"Edna (Sevigny) is like an empty bat signal for a girlboss or successful cultural self."
Amalia Ulman been knew. Her sophomore venture, Magic Farm (2025), plays like a 360-view of a devoutly organised trousseau box, flat-packed with everything a girl needs to become a woman: bridal linens, family heirloom jewels, and heavily diarised secrets. Ulman's bridal package consists of nylon tablecloths, camera equipment, and surgically constructed arguments in ethno-nihilism. The same starter-pack that prepares a woman for marriage is what I imagine prepared Magic Farm to be the final word on the collapse of Western multiculturalism.
Which is fine, I guess. It makes sense - even. Ulman is an Argentine-Spanish filmmaker and an immigrant artist living and working in New York. I was once, too, an Argentine-Spanish immigrant artist living in the city. Except, I am actually Russian and barely made any art. I am certain, however, that we would have had many of the same run-ins with the insidious “creative” that the film portrays. Simon Rex plays Dave "a creative" twat pushing 40-something whose narcissism spawns an eerie vitalist force, capable of turning tricks on the dirty streets of the algorithm using even the slimiest offcuts from the content farm. A group of these men, born of VICE, are called “an agency." In a profoundly meta-textual casting choice, the agency is spearheaded by girlboss Chloe Sevigny, styled and poised like late-stage Man Repeller. Supporting her is famed gay-looking straight actor Alex Wolff, who plays Jeff, Chloe Sevigny’s incapably horny Gen-Z producer. An incompetent, chlamydia-ridden, narcissist stoner of the visibly-ex-skater variety is an inspired character from Ulman, lifted from a taxonomy of the Verminous Male Sexual Types of New York City. Wolff’s Jeff is a generationally-pathological personality, more common than deli e.coli lettuce. I am confident in my certification of Ulman’s satire - of a creative agency making YouTube mid-form content - as spot on.
Of course these Americans are going to come to an anonymised Latin-American countryside and breakdance vaguely Spanish words with their huge, open mouths. They will impose their own, completely inaccurate portrait on the periphery in order to then get clout in the bi-coastal metropoles. Like the trousseau box, they will compartmentalise every thought and trinket into a space that makes sense for them. There is more cultural analysis than ever before, and it's super Neo-neo Colonial. Ulman drives that point home through her CapCut-esque content-forward editing. The go-pro is an obvious visual symbol of the 2010s performative obsession with putting oneself in the shoes of the Other as a means to a political end. Strapping Go-Pro cameras to the dogs and cats of St Cristobal pokes fun at the idea that this kind of universalist slapdash empathy is possible. The tumble-dryer match cuts, too, remind us of the early days of YouTube vlogging.
Not to mention, the bastardised neon grade or the Dolls Kill-era wardrobe for the models. Every vestibule needs a centrepiece, and every barnyard needs a horse that you can stroke like a stress ball in between filming grueling outfit videos. Here, Edna (Sevigny), is like an empty bat signal for a girlboss or successful cultural self. A veteran it-girl playing a veteran it-girl, she comes with emotional baggage in the form of suitcases full of spotless tabis, old Isobel Marant and an image of tortured womanhood she cannot shake. With a #metooed husband, Dave, who makes her strap into her blazer like horse in its plough in a quest for those YouTube bucks, Sevigny plays a character whose former sub-cultural clairvoyance has clearly been reiterated to the point of becoming a trend report powerpoint. Her performance is delightfully morbid, a bit telenovela, compared to the hyper-naturalistic Brooklyn mumblecore shit the rest of the cast was on.
The cracks start to show when Ulman self-inserts as Elena, the only character that speaks Spanish, and acts as the sole bridge between “the Americans” and "the locals”. She is supposed to be literally and linguistically stuck between the two worlds, existing at the standard level of cognitive dissonance required to “succeed” at immigration. Yet, we do not really see that in the script or the performance. All she confesses to seems to be that she is the real girlboss to Sevigny’s mythologized one, thugging it out for production credits.
Ulman wants so badly to paralyse the world in a doomist, punitive verdict about globalisation and its discontents. That, maybe, makes for great conversation fodder in a setting where 40 of your “closest” terminally bicoastal friends exchange deadpan remarks about how deluded everyone else is. Lines are delivered to muted ICA laughs and natural wine burps. To the rest of us, in a sort of Russian doll turn of events, Ulman and her crew came to a small village in a country significantly affected by its power imbalance-relationship with the US, they filmed their nuanced post-colonial takes, and they left the people with the absurd. Who’s gonna tell the dogs it was satire?
Essay
/ 26 June 2025 / By: Hollywood Superstar Editorial
/
★
This is the Hollywood Superstar's perspective-heavy appraisal of visual trends which emerged at Art Basel. Also included: The Swiss Art Awards, Liste, Basel Social Club and Maison Clearing. Many of the takes in the below article are reductive and potentially false. Viewed individually, these formal categorisations do not do justice to the work, time and thought that artists have imbued into their practice. And yet...! Identifying broad curatorial trends feels the most appropriate way of describing the clusterfuck of visual culture Basel produces. Culture that is, inevitably, recylced across Instagram feeds via curated and largely unwarranted magazine selections/highlights/carousels. The Superstar has curated this overarching narrative as a response to the phenomena of viewing art across two vectors; the in person fair and the online fair - the latter legitimising the former.
The Superstar is inclined to cherry-pick form and do neologisms.
Starting with the best: Basel Social Club (BSC) is a not-for-profit art fair that platforms young galleries (those under five years old) alongside major, avant-gardist and conceptual-focused galleries. The theme this year was "Bank" - heavy handed irony intended. The Social Club sets the trend for younger happenings across the city, The Swiss Art Awards included, demonstrating that art can still posesss a politically critical, tastefully subversive jouissance. At the younger fairs - visual trends manifested with no-holds-barred experimentation: "Rabelesian Grotesque", "Font Fetish", "Dolls", "Cafe Art Imitation", "Haunted House Immersive"...
One step up in the fair hierarchy is Liste. Liste presented a refined, far more marketable iteration of themes established at smaller fairs. If BSC was childlike, nïave, and optimistic - the larger scale and economic sacrifice required for Liste generated a curatorially adolescent atmosphere. Like a teenage girl, the galleries at Liste permeated a latent anxiety and a nihilistic pre-occupation with self-image. Their booths were good, no doubt, but self-conscious. None of the Da-Da ist abandonment and experimentation at Social Club. The Superstar wonders if the success of the non-mainstream, free fairs will have effect in coming years upon the neat Loosian floor-plan of Liste.
At Art Basel - the behemoth- any oscillations of aesthetic trends were far subtler. There was a very slight curatorial angle amongst the Blue Chips - a nod or gesture to something real. Between the household names on display; Rothko, Picasso, Hockney, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, et al, were artworks whose inclusion and content mirrored the zeitgeist of satellite fairs; Isa Genzken’s Neo-junk sculptures or Sylvie Fleury’s Lacanian pop-collages, Miriam Cahn’s amorphous flayed bodies or Picabia’s leering Americana; the pornographic displays of Cosi Fanni Tutti and Kara Walker; the Tromp l’oeil de-constructions of Jorg Immendorff or the braided canvases of Rosemarie Trockel. Most non-boring art could be found on the second floor. Names whose theoretical rigour and post-modernist attitude, not to mention fiscal success, act as a needed exemplar for (disillusioned) younger artists.
These groupings reflect a broader taste for art that is irreverent and satirical. This year the art which struck the Superstar resembled William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. A works salience was grounded by a tangible, off-kilter beauty.
1 Dolls, or, The Return To Figurative Sculpture
The doll has become a major trope. The emptiness embodied by the maquette, the puppet and the doll in contemporary art is related to its form or function outside of the art space. She has come to embody dissatisfaction or emptiness alongside a semi-erotic appearance and ludic personality.
Figurative sculpture's return is signalled by the influx of doll-type artistic forms - the doll sits halfway between ready-made and full-blown, Grecian verisimilitude. Like prometheus, man creates something in his image to disperse his isolation. A doll, or avatar, has always been a source of transcendental comfort. Its resurgence today signals our need for re-assurance; a humanist symbol in the face of techno-pesssimism. Mannequins are both disruptive and irreverent. In the digital realm, they have achieved the status of uncanny combatants of silicon valley.
A recent suite of exhibitions includes; Gisele Vienne at George Kolbe Museum, Lucy Mackenzie at Atelier E.B., Maya Man’s digital series “Ugly Bitches”, Isabelle Frances Maguire at The Renaissance Society, Pam Hogg at Emalin Gallery, Diego Macron at Kunsthalle Wein, Pierre Hyugher in Venice, Kara Walker’s Fortuna, Sveta Mordovskaya at King’s Leap. Not to mention the greats: Soshiro Matsubara at Croy Nielsen, Pierre Klossowski, Rosemarie Trockel and, of course, Iza Genzken. Documentaries include Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s “Maintenance”, which focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German brothel, and its forerunner, Love Me, Love My Doll (2007), about a group of men whose lives revolve around post-human interaction.
i) Children’s Dolls (humorous, found object play, relates to post-modern fatigue and consumerism)
Alex Bag (Galerie Oskar Weiss & Todd von Ammon) BSC
Ana Viktoria Dzinic (Nicoletti Contemporary) Liste
iii) The Craft Mannequin (a doll made more fetishistic by her materiality - Oskar Kokoschka’s doll, Alma, made of human hair)
Madeline Roger Lacan (galerie_eigenart) Basel
Asma_asma_asma_asma_asma_asma (LA house of Gaga) Basel
Mannequins in the cupboard at the Basel Social Club (artist unknown)
iii) The disturbed
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, The 48 Hours of Kwik & Kwak (Isabella Bortolozzi) Basel
2 Font Fetish or Logo Worship
Artists have become fascinated with the seductive tyranny of the everyday as visualised by the conglomerate logo. Meme branding has pushed us into Post-Luxury, we can look to Helvetica Black revivalism: the American Apparel font.
Sarah Staunton (Galerina) Liste
Bedros Yeretzia (Diana Gallery) Liste
Georgie Netell (Reena Spailings) Basel
Monica Bonvicini (Galleria Reffaella) Basel
Jasmine gregory (Karma international) and (Clearing)
Mohamed Almusibli, Loucia Carlier and Sylvie Fleury (Stick and Poke curated by Alana Alireza) BSC
Georgie Nettel (denitment_zh) BSC
3 “Cafe Art” Imitation
Art which consciously mimics “low” or “amateur” painting styles. The kind once described as hobbyist, usually found on the walls cafés, whose interior has not been updated since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Taste, hierarchy etc. Actually, usually very well painted.
Rita Siegfried (Clearing LA)
Sam Creasey (Andrew Reed Gallery) BSC
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste
Realist figurative painting. Everyone loves the figurative! In the peri-menopausal space between Post Woke and Woke 2 we still need it to be slightly subversive or horizontal to the out-right representational. Veering into the kitsch, this style of painting mimics the first and second faculties of what Umberto Eco calls "Ur-Fascism" : the rejection of modernity in favour of tradition and the perpetual re-interpretation of the past.
Jean Nipon (Clearing LA) Maison Clearing
Bill Coulthurst (Plymouth Rock) BSC
Francis Picabia (Galerie Isabella Bertolozzi) Basel
5 Childlike Regression Figurative
Works in which the formal style is childlike. The use of an nïave formal language throughout multiple works acts as a world-building exercise. It’s another indicator of figuration’s traditional language being diluted. What better way to deconstruct hierarchies than to appeal to their antithesis; innocence.
Maya Hewitt (Theta) BSC
Exquisite Corpse (Unknown Gallery) BSC
Gabor Pinter (longtermhandstand) BSC
Reba Maybury (Company Gallery) Liste
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains)Liste
6 Modern Gothic (Domestic Cruelness is a sub-section of this)
Already defined by Contemporary Art Writing as follows:
“Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires and impulses. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history.”
Jenny Holzer (Spruth Magers)
Franz Burkhardt’s “Bus Stop” (Littmann Kulturprojekte) BSC
Paul Levack’s images of the interiors of Venice Casinos, exacerbated by the presence of a large casino table in the room (Hans Goodrich) BSC
Mia Sanchez (Swiss Art Awards)
Cedric Eisenring (Drei Gallery) BSC
7 Domestic Cruelness
Defined by Connor Crawford in his Liste booth. As a genre, Domestic Cruelness is preoccupied with how domestic space can reflect, trigger or embody psychic disturbance. Objects which should be comforting due to their association with the private realm - the sofa, the bed, the childhood home - appear in the guise of the mass-produced object devoid of auratic presence. As with Modern Gothic, the trope reflects tenets of alienation in relation to mass-individuality.
Mia Sanchez (Sentiment) BSC
Connor Crawford (Shore Gallery) Liste
Gillian Carnegie (Cabinet) Basel
8 Haunted House Immersive
Objects that could be haunted due to their antique effect are shown as animistic, shattered representations of universalist flaws. These are often containers of sorts whose hollowed-out interior spaces have a metabolic significance. Visually, they could be lifted from the decor of a Disneyland Horror house, they are a camp affectation appealing to pop culture.
Also includes the notorious wallpapered accent.
Alexandra Metcalf at (Ginny on Fedrick) Basel
Sophie Jung (Spielzug) BSC
Shamiran Istifan (Swiss Art Awards Winner)
9 The Phantasmagoric-Pop-Pysch Collage
This trend is an artistic investigation of the archive. How our minds archive time spent in domestic or urban spaces - projections of emotion time, place and longing. Found urban objects appear in mounted wall sculpture alongside disposable early 2000s family photographs, or ephemera one might discover, covered in dust, underneath a now-grown-up child's bed. Post-American dream aesthetics collaged with bits from estate sales.
The photograph is often contrasted with the found, unrefined object. Like Sveta Mordovskaya’s photographs, taken from 2005-2008. As Margaret Kross writes of Gregory's work, the pop-psych collage is “hot mess conceptualism”.
It makes use of the ephemera desired by the aspirational middle class; the glimpse of unrealised captialist desire is phantasmagoric. One experiences it as a child, yearning for the boxed barbie behind a plastic screen, only to become dissatisfied once it is unpackaged - the idea is merely a frightenening projection.
Jasmine Gregory (Swiss Art Awards)
Sveta Mordovskaya (Swiss Art Awards)
Sarah Benslimane (Clearing)
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
Samuel Haitz (Triangolo)
10 Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil
Self explanatory, probably the trend that will define painting most (if not already) in the next year. Something about false promise, failure and the seduction of illusion.
Lucy Mckenzie (Cabinet) and (Buchloch) Basel
Karolin Braegar (City Galerie Wein) Liste
Issy Wood (Michael Werner) Basel
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste
11 Glitch-Romanticism
Taking the digital glitch and pairing it with a longing for sublimity, human connection and the romantic. Digital referents are contained within a emotional, deeply moving practice. Formally, artists make use of the glitch or blur: a shift, movement or break in the system - as a way of transforming ordinary subject matter. In other instances, artists use dated or nostalgic technology (glitch-tech) as a medium in their practice.
A fairytale tale told on a heavy set monitor or a painting with italicised, equally spaced font floating on the picture plane, as if placed by a text-box.
Ana Vik (Nicoletti) Liste
Matthias Groebel, (Mai 36 Galerie) Basel
Mathis Altman (Fitzpatrick gallery) BSC
12 Effervescent Grotesquerie
Abject subject matter depicted in effervescent hues. Paint seems to “evaporate” from the canvas as it is applied in washed out layers. The trauma of an abortion is exacerbated by the genre’s stylistic softness.
Evangeline Turner (A.Squire) Liste
Miriam Cahn (Meyer Riegger) Basel
13 Formally Rabelaisian
Gargantuan distortion. Rabelaisian means “to display earthy humour, Bawdy”. Formally, this manifests in rounded forms and cartoon-like human presentation. Style tends to fear towards kitschiness, commonality or “low” styles akin to Breughal’s representation of the bacchnicalic lower classes. Human figures convey joviality, but this happiness is filled with mirth.
Witt Fetter (Derosia) BSC
Hans Schärer (Galerie Mueller) BSC
Francis Picabia (Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery) Basel
Cosima von Bonin (La houseofgaga) Basel Unlimited
14 Brain Rot Carnivalesque Entertainment
Taking inspiration from the circus where freaks, oddities and societal outcasts are celebrated. Instead, presented to the crowd for amusement are the multifarious “brain rot” functions of the internet. The entertainment of the online masses is translated for the public.
Foreign/domestic mannequins by Jeffrey Dalessandro. Handmade mannequin of Luigi Mangione replete with gun and backpack. (Foreign and Domestic), BSC
South Park/Lacan by Marc Kokopeli (King of Venmo) ( Reena Spaulings) BSC
Urs fischer (The Modern institute) Basel
Noemi Pfister (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
Paul Fritz and Virginie Sistek (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
15 Fine Graphic Fetish
Fantastical illustration, usually fetish imagery, elevated by the artists attention to detail and skill with graphite shading.
Painting the context of one’s camera roll. Using the image juxtaposition of John Berger with meme-like screenshotted images.
Al Freeman (56 Henry) Liste
17 Ready Made Shapes
Cookie cutter Shapes. It’s unclear whether the vogue for incorporating patterns or ready made shapes into art directly reflects similar trends in fashion. One reason these shapes have been incorporated is for their immediacy, their cheapness is seductive, but, increasingly repetitive.
A classic high/low motif that sometimes pays off and sometimes appears like an art school interpretation of early 2010’s Word Art Shapes.
The abstract polka dot oscillates between a 2003 prada skirt pattern and a cheerful zombie formalist canvas.
Jutta Koether
Gritli Faulhaber (Maison Clearing)
Jim Lambie (The Modern Institute) Basel
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
18 The Self-Conscious Abstract Painter
Why paint with semi-cubist forms today? What does it mean? What is the point? Is the artist using these modernist forms as a self-conscious reflection on the shifting nature of the avant-garde?
These works are often successful for two reasons: 1) They utilise the succesful moniker of modernist abstraction while 2) The self-mockery contained in using said modernist forms creates an erudite "inside joke" for the connoisseur viewer. "Ha, Ha" the buyer says "This is a very clever commentary on dated notions of abstraction in painting - the gun is a substitute for modernism's brusque machismo energy...
In a hut tucked between Shibuya and Ebisu is a new gallery space which opened last month. Well - ‘new’ isn’t quite accurate - but - ‘hut’ is no exaggeration. Since 2022, Tenko Nakajima has been running Galerie Tenko Presents as a nomadic space. These intuitive and nichely curated shows have occurred in locations cleverly orientated for each artists work; these range from a love hotel in Kabukicho for a Louis Backhouse exhibit, or the Hysteric Glamour shop hosting the installations of Argentinian director Amalia Ulman. Now, Tenko has got the keys to her first permanent space. It’s a hut that used to be a bar, that, as Tenko recalls, she had visited as a teenager circa 2015 on electro-swing nights, which, “already, during its peak was considered a bad genre.”
The inaugural exhibit in the space Vintage features installation work by English artist Merlin Carpenter. Tenko describes how she shared a taxi with Carpenter in Busan last year, how they discussed his Marx and Trier drawings - Trier being Marx’s birthplace. Carpenter made these works during a residency in Beijing (perfect) - they struck Tenko as both relevant and vintage. Boom, she goes off about how Tokyo is actually the capital of vintage and preserving the past:
“Vintage stores are treated like museums here, each item is repaired, cleaned and so-curated. I love the thought of the buyers frequenting a suburban Goodwill or Humana once a year, filling up boxes with weathered reunion t-shirts and college jumpers and restoring them to Japanese standards. Then re-selling them at prices surpassing their original tags.”
My first impression of Galerie Tenko Presents caught me standing between a Denny’s and a Starbucks - no Galerie or art kids in sight. I called Greta, a close friend of Tenko’s and I, who had invited me to go with her to the vernissage of Vintage - I’d hopped into a cab straight after my 9-5. She put Tenko on the phone, who apologized and chuckled,
“Of course, I put it wrong in the IG bio - sorry!”. She passed me the right address and I rode another ten minutes in an uber that smelled like citrus Febreeze. The vernissage was supposed to be over in five minutes - but, of course, there was no rush among the group of bright young things mingling and smoking right outside.
Before I could even set foot inside, I was stopped by my dear friends, Yoma (big scar through right eye, even bigger heart) and Carlos (mysterious guy, youtube connoisseur) who took my heavy Longchamp X Jeremy Scott bag off me and handed me a beer. We chatted about everything but art while a cute girl kept on staring at us. I wanted to include her in the conversation, because I felt awkward for her - she seemed to just want to be part of something and so clearly was not. After, I realised she was actually there with Carlos, he introduced her to me, in front of her, as follows: “She’s a Louis Vuitton bag customizer and one time she was commissioned to paint a father kissing his kid on the lips, so she painted this image on the LV trunk, but then LV did not approve of this image and now because of this incident LV only offers selective pre designed customisation.” She nodded her head. I didn’t get her name.
I squeezed past the people, said 'hi' to Tenko who just come back from LA and recieved a quick debrief of all that happened, could have happened, but did not, on her trip. She was wearing a cute beige matching set and was serving beer behind the bar with her mom, Hanayo an acclaimed experimental artist. Finally, I find Greta, she is chatting to a guy called Alex (never met him before, celine vintage bag, skinny pants, is offended about me asking if he works an office job) about her new loaded Glock 19 tattoo on her thigh. It’s big and sore and dope. “It’s the first gun I shot.” she says. She had gotten it to cover a tattoo she’d grown tired of.
I escape the conversation by climbing up the wobbly wooden ladder to the top floor of the gallery (I shall not be able to wear any of my outrageous heels to the next show). The uppermost floor looks like an abandoned Japanese bedroom. Partly falling apart; quite charming. Carpenter has painted his black, thick-stroke faces not on canvases, but on the gallery’s walls. Sprawling, with no boundaries, over the wood and metal inserts. Open Territory. It will be interesting to see how it interacts with the work of following exhibitors, like the second intervention in the space, by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, **Hanshan Shide.
A selection of Carpenter’s 2006 pencil sketches on paper lean against the walls in glass frames. My favourite, Trier (Beijing) 2 (2006) depicts a group of Karl Marx busts. They all look mad. It makes me think of when Beijing gifted the city of Trier a statue of Marx for his 200th birth year anniversary in 2018, and Trier was reluctant to accept the offer. Now, the statue stands, a 4.4-metre bronze statue, just off the main street.
Merlin Carpenter glided past the crowd like a wizard, his long hair flashing white-grey-brown as he snapped photos of us with a tiny camera. Carpenter’s entire career hums with political tension. Grounded in Marxist materialism, his work tears through the illusion of artistic autonomy, laying bare the art world’s unavoidable entanglement with capitalism. He doesn’t soothe; he sabotages. One of my favourites? Communism Time for a Bath (2003), a repurposed BlackBerry Alpen cereal box.
I climbed back down. The vernissage was over. We all walked off together to find an izakaya big enough to hold us all. I was overwhelmed, and Greta was overwhelmed, so she suggested we should Irish exit. We did so. Then she changed her mind, “Wait, let’s say bye,” so there we went back and said bye. The weakest Irish exit ever. I lit a cigarette on my way home with my new Tenko Presents lighter. It has a quote on the back, which I’d forgotten. I just looked it up on Tenko’s webshop. It says: “I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this and I am not.” I don’t know who you are, Georgie, but thanks.
Matt Gess’s Maiden Crimes 1 (2025) and Militia (2025) were shown at Récréations a show by Gnossienne Gallery alongside work by Nayan Patel, Sasha Miasnikova and Jordan Derrien. View the project on Instagram here.
*Maiden Otto*
There’s something that can only be brought out by being locked away: this is the tension that suspends Maiden Crimes. "It’s about yin and yang", said [legendary erotic photographer] Eric Kroll to Matt Gess, who had tracked him down to his kitchen table in Arizona. Balance is a notion that applies just as much to the climbing of chain-link fences as it does to the ecstasy of constrained compositions; these are all driving forces behind Gess's work.
Coming across a Maiden is a revelation that makes the word casting appear sanitised and crass. “You know what Eileen? I think [NAME] might be a Maiden…” We cock our heads, squint our eyes and pout our lips at each other, considering the idea like we just tasted something new. What’s your taste? Matt describes things like trespassing as ‘delicious’. Maidens are discovered, they walk out of the water of their past dripping with becoming; like every crime, they are unique. For example: Maiden Kirsten was sitting on the pavement of Kingsland road, “parked outside Greggs, lipstick defiant”,“she styled herself, quickly stuffing a circus flyer in her bra”. Charlie Osbourne emerged to Matt in another way: the theatricality of her rigid and heartfelt musical performances. These are subjects Matt observes from the anonymous position of an audience member or passerby- Maidens emerge having built their own kinds of stages: Kirsten with her pile of street cardboard, or Charlie at the ICA... Maiden is a project that poses seductively in the field of surveillance, anonymity and consent; no wonder Matt calls it a ‘license to voyeurism’.
*Maiden Kirsten*
His spare captions under his instagram posts are tantalisingly partial origin stories: “I saw Vivi working behind an Irish bar in Helsinki two hours before my flight back home. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my room and play dress-up.” Matt turns to me, “She works in KFC,” he says, breathlessly, “it’s perfect.”
And this is the key to understanding why the pictures have the effect that they do: it is a fetishistic approach to the details of living, of being, that makes Maiden Crimes the realest. The fetish is not the black patent heels, the velvet mask or the nipple cover; it’s not the leather glove, or the absence of a lower arm, it’s not the top of a flesh coloured stocking or the 1930s girdle, or any of the objects Matt plays with - it is none of these things in and of themselves. It’s the focus of an eye on a singular point, it is the tension of bodily concentration until one’s mind empties: not falling from the platforms; the explosion of a stepped-on grape; the expression of breath into an instrument and its contortion into sound, it is the narrowing in on a target until it is the right moment to squeeze the trigger… “you know when you shoot someone you say: I’m going to shoot this person. And it’s like what? With a camera or a gun? It’s the same thing.” This violent metaphor is appropriate for an artist whose alter ego Claudia Speed comes from the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto II.
*Matt Gess in the house of Eric Kroll*
Perhaps it is enough for now, to simply say that the fetish look invests objects with a magical coercive power over individual subjectivity. Matt’s work recognises the addictive determinism generated by Fetish. Careful arrangement of objects set in motion a sequence of events: female clothes on a male body creates certain life-situations. Cross-dressing in West Hollywood, Matt says, “I would find myself climbing over chain-link fences”.L.A plays itself, life seduces itself, one thing leads to another…
“When I was cross dressing and going to these strip clubs I’d literally be getting into these cars with these men and climbing these fences. It wasn’t always sexual. I love iron gates and what it represents of being locked away, and I think that kind of came from growing up in South Africa- the gated compounds with security and it was always just like quite fascinating and really beautiful because you’ve kind of got like these illuminated swimming pools and these big like chunky gates that have, like, electricity going through them.”
Apart from the strip clubs of Hollywood, there is another cinematic influence on the project. In his room in East London, Matt’s nameless Canary likes to perch on his stack of Alan Clarke DVDs. The Yorkshire-born director (1935-1990), whose later minimalist works on topics such as the miner’s strike, Road (1988); childhood heroin use, Christine (1987) and the Troubles in Ireland Elephant(1989) gave the violence of British Social Realist Cinema the Bressonian purity, precision and appeal of a finger dragged across skin, the sound of a dress being unzipped. The video of Osbourne in a prim buttercup-yellow dress spinning and playing her harmonica iconica, is a performance that would not have been amiss from the legendary party scene in Road. There is a clear fascination in Crimes not just with the acting in Clarke’s films, but the social-psychological aura emitted through the stripped-back nature of the sets. Their cheap plain kitchens and unplastered walls, like the pale, rail-thin bodies of Maidens, captivate in their austerity. There is a tension of set and character; history and choice: between the purple pub carpet and aubergine hair; neglected linoleum and patent heels, of weathered junkie skin against orange brick. Clarke’s protagonists and Matt’s Maidens are aesthetic creations that both tenderly embody and fiercely rebel against their surroundings.
We are in a borrowed mansion in Epping Forest, surrounded by chintz and framed photographs of an English family where the mothers wear pearls. Matt is preparing the room, where, in two hours’ time, he will shoot Maiden Rafe. Elusin’s song, silhouette, fills up with the room alongside the smoke machine- the shoegaze haze activates the power of the objects thrown on the bed: Mickey Mouse mask; Eric Stanton Book; black caged hoop skirt; patent heels size 10; a single white gym sock (photographer’s own). Ignoring the still life he had been arranging on the floor, Matt turns to the assemblage on the bed: “accidents are the whole point.” Whilst the shoots are planned carefully, there is a refreshing lack of career-calculation to Maiden Crimes, “I have to hide my phone after I post.” Matt tells me, “quite a few stylists have got in contact, which is nice of them, but a certain part of me is just like… fuck off?”.
This is why Matt’s photos stand out from the scroll; as we are inundated with digital pornography, the analogue fetish adventure endures…
Can fiction ever be art criticism? How did the merger between the art world and advertising occur? Where is the reward in critical distance?
Natasha Stagg admires art, but would not call herself an art critic. Her book, Artless (Stories 2019-2023) documents the fashion, art and nightlife scenes of New York city. A follow up to Sleeveless (2011-2019), Artless comprises dispatches from NYC’s artistic “scene”- with essays featured in Spike, Artforum, Buffalo Zine and Gagosian Quarterly. Always self-effacing, the author pleads with us not to take things too seriously by describing her new book as “What I think sometimes, some days, about some things”.
You could mistake Stagg’s writing for autofiction (with titles like “Is Anyone Listening to Me? I Love It” and “Social Suicide”) but the star of Artless is Stagg’s foray into pithy, non-autobiographical shorts. Her upcoming fiction work, Grand Rapids, tells the tale of fifteen year-old Tess and her titular Michigan hometown. Published in September through Semiotext(e), its cover features one of Issy Wood’s painted Fiat interiors. Wood’s work is an apt choice - her painted veneration of stagnant objects reflects Stagg’s writing, which transforms Grand Rapids into a collection of architecture and emblems.
Here, Stagg speaks with Hollywood Superstar editor Sydney Sweeney about the moral grey area of her profession, the mythical creature that is the objective art critic and her high school reunion in Michigan.
Sydney Sweeney
Tell us about the title Artless? We know, and love, Sleeveless. Each of your collection titles feels super specific.
Natasha Stagg
My editor Chris Kraus suggested adding date range as as a way of establishing it as a series of essays born from a certain time. The name ‘Sleeveless’ is fairly enigmatic. You don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get from its title, so you add a subtitle : ‘Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019’ and people know it’s a book of essays. Artless is a word often used to describe prose, as in ungainly, naive, imprecise. While I like art, I'm not an expert. A lot of the stories were assignments or press releases, but I call them “stories” because that’s what they all are, even if they were also musings, or reviews, or diaries.
SS
One of my favorite chapters in Sleeveless talks about the microtrend and the micro influencer. Do you think we have micro trends in contemporary art right now?
NS
The NYC scene, which is the only one I would know right now, does feel increasingly niche.It does feel a little bit oversaturated with micro- influencers - that thing of everybody knowing everybody. Is there such a thing as there being too many, or not enough, personalities?
SS
There’s a photo of Charli XCX wearing a t-shirt with - “They don’t build statues of critics” on it. Where is the reward in having critical distance?
NS
I respect critics more than I respect my own profession, probably. I think I'm trying to be as honest as possible about my involvement in the scene, in my writing. Almost all critics have some kind of involvement with what they write on, but serious critics get basically nothing from it, not even good pay, and they work because they are just passionate about unbiased commentary needing to exist. The art world is so circle jerky, and corrupt, and objective critics are so rare at this point, maybe there should be statues of them.
SS
Art speak can be incredibly alienating, it’s a way of excluding certain people from the art world.
NS
I am interested in the way that art can work its way into fashion or marketing - there is a lot of cross pollination. People get tired of the same words, so you have to find synonyms. Sometimes these come from slang, or memes or whatever, but people can see through the application of viral language to marketing really quickly - it’s so painfully obvious when advertising adapts the language of the internet.
SS
A lot of Artless is fiction, moving away from the cultural critique towards a short story format that recalls Mary Gaitskill.
NS
I have always been happier writing fiction. It provides a kind of freedom. In non-fiction you are making a claim, even when you state clearly you’re not an authority on whatever the subject is. In the introduction to Artless I tell the reader not to listen to any of these claims. My favourite story is maybe the one I wrote as a press release for the artist Alex Carver. He did a show of paintings that used a process of layering prints with an intricate stamping process. His research ended up inspiring ‘Transplant’, which follows a family whose patriarch has a transplanted heart.
SS
The combination of fictional writing and the display of art has formed a new kind of art criticism, maybe without the critical element. I think it’s exciting.
NS
I am so inundated with cultural criticism at this point, writing more of it can feel like throwing fuel onto a fire. Or pointless. My goal has always been to focus on language, so that it is the writing that moves, rather than the content. And anyway, there is no such thing as fiction and non-fiction, really. Nothing can be proven to be either or the other. There's also no such thing as critical distance. Whatever lines exist, they can always be blurred.
SS
Do you see yourself as a writer more than, let's say, an art or scene critic? Or are you a mixture of both, like Cookie Mueller, who wrote Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black?
NS
I always go back to Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote so much criticism and commentary, but also one of the best novels, Sleepless Nights, when she was 63. I feel really good about having written four books. It means I am actually a writer. My first book could have been a one-off; I wrote it in grad school. The second and third were collections of shorter pieces I’d mostly already written as assignments. So it feels good that I’m publishing another novel, even if it’s ten years after the first one.
SS
It feels as if the time period in which Artless is set, the years of Covid, fuelled the transition in your writing practice from cultural critiques to fictional storytelling.
NS
I think you’re right. Covid was an online overload. Many of us experienced a collective media fatigue. To pivot after this time is only natural - there was so much reflection on reality, maybe too much, and life became miserable. Everyone was looking for a way to escape; fiction writing feels like an extension of that desire.
SS
How long have you been working on Grand Rapids?
NS
It’s hard to say. I started it right after publishing my last novel, Surveys, in 2016, but I didn’t do anything with it for a long time and then came back to it recently. I’m sure a lot of people have had this feeling - of coming back to something and recognising any of the words. I feel that way with my Substack, even. I will often re-read something I’ve published to make sure I’m not repeating myself, but it will feel foreign even two days later. It’s all a balancing act. You want to write away from what you have already written, but you don’t want to think so much about it that it inhibits your natural flow.
SS
Natural flow is kind of my worst enemy. I wait until it reaches me to start a piece. Can you tell me a bit about the plot of Grand Rapids?
NS
It’s a kind of coming-of-age story set in the city where I lived during high school. When I finished writing Grand Rapids, I actually went back to Grand Rapids for my high school reunion. It felt like I was doing reconnaissance for the book. When you grow up somewhere, things feel differently sized when you go back. The city felt bigger, not smaller, than I remembered. It has grown, but that wasn’t it. The buildings downtown felt bigger.
SS
I know it’s fiction, but, did you tap into your own autobiography?
NS
Of course. That’s always the easy in for me. I wanted to start with something I had a lot of emotional knowledge of. My high school days were my own and still are, but I was interested in whether revisiting that time and place could get me to a character arc, something more universal. I love talking to people who are younger or older than me who find something to relate to in my writing. It’s cool to know that my stories are not necessarily tethered to a generation. You always hear that millennials are so different from zoomers or whoever else, but I have had an opportunity to see what is similar between us, the opportunity being that I can publish stories and know from the response that non-millennials read them, too.
SS
I mean, it’s the mark of a good writer if your work unconsciously speaks to a group of people, even if that wasn’t the intention.
NS
Definitely. I have a lot of trouble with a specific type of Gen X writer I used to like more when they lately take a defensive stance on their generation. It’s different for each generation but, I don’t think you see the signs until it’s too late.
I met Countess Elizabeth Bàthory in the pub opening her leather trench coat, I was hoping she would flash me but she only wanted to flog me her DVDs. “Cult…” she gasped, between breaths of cigarette smoke that came trickling out from her mouth, and perhaps also her nose and ears... she seduced me through her last remaining eyelashes giving me the look of a smouldering cinepheliac... I could only oblige... My roommate stole my DVD player and I cancelled my MUBI subscription so I left 20 quid poorer and with so much plastic in my living room, watching YouTube Shorts. Where was the cinema? I saw her again sleeping under a piece of carpet in a corner of Peckhamplex. Timidly, I asked her, since I couldn’t watch the films myself, whether she would be able to summarise them for me. “I already have,” she said, “I’ve been thinking of you.” She touched my hand as she gave me a stack of papers, she was soft with an ancient twinkle in her eye. This new blog series for Hollywood Superstar is a transcription of her manuscripts.
Vol.1: The Bloodettes (2005), set in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in the year 2025. Director Jean-Pierre Bekolo said that he was bemused to hear from European critics that he had made "The First African sci-fi film". An outspoken critic of Western film festival imperialism and its obstruction of African cinematic self-definition, Bekolo addressed these concerns directly in his 2018 open letter to the Berlinale, which can be read here. Bekolo makes films for “places, not for audiences”. His films are about Yaoundé, where “funerals are the best parties,” and where the complete mimicry of the Hollywood horror genre is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, by attempting to make sci-fi in a place without a future - where bureaucracy is bloody and time is unstable - Bekolo’s process yields a film of “many impossible genres.” Shown last year at UCLA’s programme African Futurism perhaps this morbidly sexy political satire fits more comfortably in the tradition of The Gothic. Two vampiric sex workers deal with the dead body of a dictator by using their seductive/destructive bodies as modern agents of the pre-colonial women's secret society Mevoungou. For the enjoyers of neon-soaked streets, those who want to see women sexually dominate in ways scientifically unforeseen, those interested in hearing the hardest loop from a post-millenium soundtrack…
- Eileen Slightly
The diary of Countess Elizabeth Báthory: The Bloodettes (2005)
'My friend is tired - Your corpse is beautiful’
One moment the light and sounds were falling out of the shut door, and the next only a scream. It’s weird however used I am to women screaming it’s always a jump to hear someone you love do it. Into the room we fell from the ceiling, His body was cold, wet and stiffer then His cock just 2 minutes prior. How did a man write and direct this, how did he write us so right and real we not only demand respect from you, but love and respect ourselves. Anyway, more of that later. First we gotta find out what to do with this Goddam body. All these powerful men coming and cumming night in night out, they uphold an idea of this country and our cunts that frankly don’t work. You see this country is independent now, but the structure of hypocrisies was left behind, and these dogs of men desperately re-enforce it.
How can you describe our future when you’ve only focused on re-writing our history? We’re living in the future of 2025, listening to mevoungou, we know this dystopia like it avoids us. How can you expect us to dance and sit and look this goddam good just to belittle our native tongues? Yep you paid for this night, but we paid for this country with our asses.
“How can you film a love story where love is impossible?”
Quickly we lost his body either in a fridge or another scene, now alone with us three in this car and his head in a Sainsbury’s bag for life, we ride.
How can you feign sisterhood? I can’t even explain it, you would just have to experience it, or you just have to believe when I say it’s me + Majolie + Chouchou 4eva. To recognise the ‘I’ is to admit there is not only you but others, tonight I reject this self-alienation, there is no ‘I’ only ‘we’. Our blood has been sucked and un-sucked time and time again. Who said this story is one you can follow? You make us laugh. This is beyond narrative, beyond these structures and beyond the systems we’ve been raised in. Tonight we will get ready in our own time. Slow motion fight scenes in front of cars and hotel rooms remind me of the old kung-fu movies we’d mimic as kids, the powers of the east to battle the evils of the west. We shimmy around putting on knickers and skirts and swapping tops and blotting lipstick. Circles around the bedroom, I smile up at the posters they have in their room, especially the Scream (1996) one that I too have hung on the wall in the nook of my lair. Our beautiful bodies joyfully montage to the repeating melodies, we hum along. I feel the blood leave my veins and I’m light headed again. This is sacred.
Eternal powers, cgi, holding her hand. We sit to eat at the table in the room we cooked in. I sip lots of green potion from my comically large wine glass and transport back and forth from this alien planet to the moon. 2025 is here, I wear glitter on the lids of my eyes and the sky has the colours of love bites and wine.
“How can you make a horror film in a place where death is a party”
I slurped and sniffed too many letters this weekend and now the salt I lick from my fingers burns my tongue. He throws a punch and I knock him to the ground, my kung foo choreo is reminiscent of Bausch; the absurdity of reality. Blood takes a hold of him, clogging up his airways, choking him, he always liked it rough. He splutters red, Majorie reaches over and with her finger collects the thick dribble and smudges it onto her lip and cheek. My tummy grumbles. Only through destruction can we achieve such beauty...or something like that.
When their zippers are undone, their walls come down, they told us all their secrets and now we can use them to bury the body.
Stood around the open casket, orange plates holding cake. We exist in these spaces of the in-between and nowhere in particular. How did we get here? Was this before or after? It doesn’t matter, it just happens; how can we continue to make sense in plots and art when the real life makes no sense at all. Our world holds too many histories, projections and thingamabobs all too intersected to be told or sold separately. Christian Metz defines fiction as “seems-real” tonight we define fiction as “non-fiction”. The General's dead and we gossip over his body.
I spent this evening surrounded by my best friends, but whispering with Him, he too saw the words I was saying. They bled into his skin and he said little but wrote me the sort of lines I usually struggle to write. We performed so naturally that I wondered if we’d directed it together, or if he just had once been me as well as the director. I don’t know, it’s confusing, but as I said, isn’t that the point. This evening bled out of his skin and we appeared clean in a morning. I smiled on my way home, clambering into bed with my Majolie and my Chouchou, they sleepily engulfed me with body and blanket, and together we shall wait for tomorrow.
"How can you make an action film in a country where acting is subversive?”
Why the fuck are you still trying to answer me? There is no answer. Well I’m lying. There’s too many answers, a thousand truths and you still pick to pray to one. The lights flood out the opening door,
out the hotel bed sheets,
out the limousines window rolling down,
out the open casket,
out all the holes,
bam.
BAM. Light floods out over us all, and how can you still hide in a place with no shadows but your own?
As part of a regular blog, waitress-turned-writer-turned-political-savant Floss Crossley responds to baiting questions from Editorial. Crossley mediates on political apathy, slacktivism, dictatorial boardgames and the continually futile philosophising of micro-trends. WE THANK HER.
I just invaded China by candlelight. The electricity has run out.
I lost my card again so I can’t take money out so I can’t top it up at the store.
But it’s ok we have some old wax burnt down to a height too ugly for
tomorrow’s restaurant guests. My ears are warmed by an aviator hat I refer to
as Russian and my boyfriend’s upset his new jacket will be my new jacket now because he
thought he was a woman’s small. His six silver buckles are
creaking out a whistle from any slight movement.
My friend L starts shouting at my friend M. M’s dressed like he’s a
young Sci-Fi concubine- loose twisting linens and high-laced
leather boots. L is in a tall Prussian Cavalry hat, black, red
lining, gold stitching. M rolled a six, as he always seems to
do, and now his two green men are a massive threat to L’s
five orange occupying Scandinavia. My friend E is bored
and wants to actually hang out and talk and things. She has a
weed leaf and a Jamaican flag on the camo jacket I gave her
that came in the post for me, but I couldn’t have ordered. I’m
in a coat that makes my shoulders extend to far greater
lengths than our grandmothers could have hoped for us in
the 70s when they burnt their bras.
Most of my legs are covered, but the last button is only nay heigh so the two parts of the
coat swing open to reveal my cute little brogues. They
ripped open on a job interview- but luckily the interviewer
was an artist, so I got the job and he taped them up, but the
only tape he had was for his artwork, which was real camo
tape from Operation Desert Storm, but then I’m not sure if
I’ve got the job anymore because this was six months ago and
it’s subject to funding. But now, if I take Russia, I’ll have the
whole of Asia, and I can expand west. I’ll let L and M shout
and I’ll laugh every time they emasculate each other so that
they will make rash competitive moves and not notice how I
benefit from a weakened Europe.
While L dramatically rolls his dice, I check the light box in my hand. I click “See Post Anyway” to a trigger warning on Instagram. I see a dead child. Their face is obscured by blood. Below reads “liked by my ex boyfriend and others”. I know he’s liking the journalism, not the content, but it still reads in bad taste. I look around at the kitchen. The room is foggy. E’s clothes dry dangled over the kitchen cabinets. She did not manage to get all the dog period out of her new Polish T-shirt so her Black Water merch really is stained in blood. The heat of the room - the wet smoker’s breath locked in to keep out the winter wind - causes the tape which held an old photo against the fridge to finally give up its last grip. The glue’s dried out. The paper floats calmly down - the space heater’s upwards breeze allowing it to fall in slow motion- turning seductively from a mysterious food-stained blank side to reveal to me a long enough flash of text and garment- Melania in Kakhi:
I DONT REALLY CARE DO YOU ###
When S. Sweeney asked me to discuss the correlation between my milieu’s habit of wearing military regalia and the current accelerating political climate, I have to admit I was a little defensive. My reasons to be so I think are summed up in that historic image of the First Lady climbing the steps of air force one.
I. Trendy Military jackets are nothing new, we’ve only just moved on from last decade’s olive green high street revolutionaries.
II. I’m forced to address or even allude to the Indie Sleaze revival, and in a worse extension, I’m forced to address that a notable response of my friends and I - in the wake of mass global horrors - is as immaterial as a mild change in style and self-imaging.
One line of Research:
Vogue says:
Few garments better encapsulate the “I love typewriters and casual amphetamines” spirit of the indie sleaze than ornate martial jackets.
Even typing the words indie sleaze to say you don’t care about indie sleaze feels too much like an authorial legitimising of indie sleaze. (That's five
times I’ve said it now) I’ve always been
disgusted by the Hellp and the fit of their jeans. I
think it’s nice when my best friends waddle
around in tight denim and pointy sandals, but I
don’t want to see a plastic outline of what men
are lacking. I understand that the military jacket
is now often associated with the post-Celine
Opium for white boys vibe you see on evil “What
Are People At The X Gig Wearing” reels. And I
am uncomfortable with a restaurant coworker
assuming my association. But I do
own a typewriter and am prescribed
amphetamines. Separate to any contemporary
influence in this trend, there is definitely a bit of
newly or not-so-newly adults just dressing up as
what they thought a cool person looked like
when they were twelve. We have given up faith in new ideas of cool as they seem untrustworthy,
manipulated by all the microplastics and blue light rays we have since allowed to poison our imaginations.
There’s a very Gothic current to the English Memory of the World Wars. As a child on the 11th of November a melodramatic solemnness would take over me. In the shade of the town’s memorial monument, I’d display my plastic poppy on the square breast of my duffel coat with all the seriousness of a junior cadet. Staring up at the awesome obelisk, I would whisper a prayer for my troops and my country. The cold turning my little cheeks and fingers pink, I’d yearn for my father’s hand as he stood a foot behind me far away on the beaches of Normandy. I’d then wake up to shake my head at classmates slightly further along in puberty then I, their sweet perfumes smells and metallic crisp rattlings invading my total sensorial immersion in the still, calming fantasy of an old world war. At school, I took Evacuee Day so seriously that I was scouted by a teacher to play a sickly Victorian child in mortar and pestle workshops at the local community centre.
Maybe the hot nazis in New York think they’re being Libertines when they wear a trump hat and say retard. And the anorexic revival of this fashion is definitely not completely detached from their popularity. I do think, however, that a real fascist dress code is a lot more The Row than Slimane or Ali Express. People looked at Melania’s inauguration outfit and choked at the return to fascism. The Chanel style tailoring and colour scheme was certainly 1940s inspired, but I’d argue this is still cosplay over continuation. Georgia Meloni is a real fascist and she is one of the most normal looking people I have ever seen.
And, now, months after I began writing I’m still sitting around the table playing my board game. America and China are now in a trade war. Germany has promised to increase their military spending. I’m losing all of Europe, isolated in my island territory with a few guilty figures in the Middle East. They’re quietly well defended but unable to expand. It's Spring now so I wear a light Kakhi jacket I borrowed from L to dress as one of Gadaffi’s bodyguard for Halloween. I’ve paired it with a cute Glastonbury vibe dress just like TikTok showed me to. I want the white dress to feel like the end of the Hunger Games, I have my man and a child and a large expansive field with only birds over head. I'm not from District twelve, I'm from London and could probably do this all right now if I really wanted. But late at night I'd watch the Tesla satellites cross past the stars and know I’d still be in cosplay. The world is very loudly falling apart, and we know that we are not the real victims, nor the true perpetrators. We’re complicit through our impotency, we’re zombie soldiers dragged through comfortable trenches, hoping at least one of us could be a Sigfried Sasoon or Wilfred Owen.
Below are three accounts from the editorial team of their time at EU:RE/ London Woodstock/ Battle of the Bands. We hope that the multivalency of our narrative can put the ROCK back into baroque; as we shimmy up the Post-Drain pipe to the heavens of NEW BRITISH MUSIC. Here we are:
Cyberdog mini dress and over-the-knee black fishnet socks
The fever dream which was The Cause became a house party without a house and an afters before the gig had finished. The night was a mystical green room with a club attached underneath. In the upstairs bar people kept accidentally drinking the non-alcoholic strawberry cocktail puree, which looked like ketchup in a cup.
The downstairs was an apocalyptic onslaught of what I’ve started describing as ‘Post Drain’. I’ve noticed a scene of kids, maybe 5 years younger than me, glorifying what my early teen years were. They are a mismatch of drainer sensibilities, Sherlock fanfic era tumblr, proto influencer-Charlie Barker mixed with early 2000s; emo, mallgoth, gyaru, grime, Lolita and e-girl.
This is what I imagine all those magazines are constantly trying to coin as the godforsaken term Indie Sleeze. I fear they have it all wrong. Yes, these guys are wearing Isabel Marant sneaker wedges - but - they aren’t trying to glorify the downtown Hipster scene of the 2010s or the indie aesthetic; it’s a much more nuanced amalgamation of internet-core. They’re fans of the ”UK underground”, they listen to BassVictim, Fakemink, Fimi, Feng, with their forefathers being Lancey, Yung Lean, Lil B and Imogen Heap. It’s heavily attached to the music being made now, not just a replica of past counterculture-turned-aesthetic.
The atmosphere of the club, despite making me feel fucking old at the age of 23, was good. I had begun worrying that Covid had fucked up the 18 year olds ability to party, but, as I danced (pressed up against the security guards trying to control Maria’s quirked-up crowd) my faith was restored. They happily partied to Leo’s 10-piece hippie band WPDMT complete with Effie’s hand-knit headbands, bongos and a whistle, and I have to say I’m walking away glad the scene isn’t all Hedi Slimane and no fun.
DSquared dress. Chie Mihara heeled pumps. Sheer white knee socks
I was in the Green Room when someone turned to me to ask if I had a filter. “Wait”, she said, “You actually don’t look like the kind of girl who would have a filter”. This was my evening at EU:RE at The Cause.
The green room is filled with people one could categorise in a high-school-cafeteria fashion. There are jocks, geeks, nerds, indie twee revivalists, myspace-emos, dolls and hot-quasi emo cheerleaders, clean-girl goths and warring ex-girlfriend vinted warriors. This may be a Jaded London culture grab visuals factory. I’m failing the micro-trend test, but winning the battle of sobriety, stepping over the vomit-caked shower in the toilets.
WPDMT, led by WPDMT (original member) and Rowan Miles. She sang like an angel and dressed like one of the nubile young women in the cult from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I respected the female-to-male ratio in this band, having spent a substantial amount of time watching all-male bands perform music to kill yourself to. WPDMT had the cadence of a sugary-sweet edible - it made the sweaty pit of the crowd feel like a shroom trip at a millennial Greenpeace festival. Think the scene needs more of that.
Bassvictim starts, and half the venue turns on their heels toward the stage. Maria’s ethereal: sitting on her knees (thigh socks are taped up with double-sided tape), hands outstretched into the crowd like she’s Mother Teresa. I have an image of her in my mind like this from a couple of shows, a baroque painting, where she leans toward the crowd while everyone’s trying to get a piece.
When Ike and Maria play, it's a mix between this heady, sweaty mosh pit and moments of absolute introspection and quiet; you're getting flung into someone, and the next moment you’re alone listening to Wooden Girl with your eyes closed.
Blue latex corset. White t-shirt. Vintage a-symmetrical skirt. Blue fishnet socks
I saw the most fragile minds of my generation grabbing at greenroom wristbands like they were the last helicopters out of Saigon
And the Viet cong was an endless flow of 18 year old emos
The mature emos (Mitsubishi Suicide) were upstairs
And so was all 300 members of Worldpeace DMT (and counting)
This is like my fyp in real life, but that’s not what I said, Issey K said that
Yung Lean saw my friend Fleur playing the whistle for WPDMT and asked her to go on tour
With him I was like damn that’s crazy.
When I say damn that’s crazy that’s when I know
my beer to coke ratio was completely off
And that I could neither smile nor laugh
Only agree. That
my corset had been squashing up my internal organs, I was like oh fuck
don’t puke on Young Lean’s bodyguards.
The curse of the cause was lifted at an undisclosed afters location
Which went on for the rest of the night and day and then some night again
Everybody gives a glimpse of their personal internal hell in these situations,
apart from Chill Chris who does Atomiser.
A tenacious doll (banned from Fold)
told me she was impressed, like damn, I didn’t know straight people
got down like this.
Everybody wants a British invasion,
recession historians aren't stuck for a reason
sensitive yanks come over
just to go back.
A few months ago I started turning my back on Contemporary Art. I had entered what I imagined to be a major phase in my early adult art/life in which I’d reject other people’s artworks and records of my own and affirm my recently acquired and self-proclaimed writer status through negation. It was dumb and after some weeks I realized that not looking at things worsened my eyesight, dropping from a Mild correction to a Moderate one.
Anyway, this text isn’t about me but After Amy, an exhibition of Jasia Rabiej and Ant Łakomsk’s works at chess club in Hamburg (18.04. – 10.05. 2025). I think there’s something great about experiencing prints/paintings/pictures (in this case I’m not sure how and if one should categorize them. 'Pictures' in the early 20th Century Gertrude Stein sense of the word seems to be the most fitting) that reveal more of their layers the more time you spend with them.
At first only formalist observations came to my mind and I couldn't tell if I liked the pictures or if I could even write about them. Though I wasn’t sure I found the work boring, something initially left me hanging on its surface. And then I met the girls. Jasia and Ant are definitely not just a surface but actually bright and funny women. Like, really clever and fun and a bit neurotic too. And that made me like the work more. When we went to have drinks on the rooftop terrace of the Radisson Blu —there aren’t many options to elevate yourself in Hamburg— they told us about J’s meme page that got taken down and Ant lectured us about the Polish Pope Jan Paweł II (RIP!).
I had conversations with Amanda, the Chess Club founder. Can one experience an artwork in its fullness if the artwork isn’t discussed or carried out with visitors, friends, and if one’s lucky, the artists themselves? I don’t think there is a way to know if you really liked something without talking or writing about it. Even when it strikes you like love at first sight, you still need to unfold what happened because it is so interesting to discuss what you love in an artwork. I guess it is difficult for me now not to see them in their art. You know when they say dog owners look like their dogs? Well, the girls definitely resemble their art.
Ant’s paintings are elongated and wear dark, washed oil colors clouded in a white veil like in Silke Otto Knapp’s work. They’re reserved and subdued at first, but not evasive. I think they know what they’re stating. When I look at them, especially Living Room and After Amanda (named after Amanda Weimer—or Amy?), I can’t help but think of 19th-century French painting. The undertones could belong to the German or Dutch traditions—maybe that’s the Polishness piercing through?—The light shrouding the silhouettes, even in the rock concert one— the rose garden setting and the bourgeois living room—I don’t know, something of the model placidness reminds me of Olympia. Maybe it is too easy to refer to French painting. Again I am not much of a critic and am not even a visual art enjoyer anymore. Jasia's work on the other hand, while also working within the realm of girlhood, depicts figures and objects tied to the register of lower-middle-class taste, even though the girls in Jasia’s pictures don’t even appear to have jobs. They’re lounging around carefree, they have time to watch Trisha Paytas videos, dabble in arts and crafts attend birthday parties, etc. We assume they are girls, not because of any clear anatomical detail but because of surrounding cultural cues — bright frosted cakes, glimmering bokeh and TV glow, souvenir snow globes, long hair, handbags, and other ephemera of soft domestic excess — all familiar signifiers in the staging of girlhood.
Amanda tells me that Jasia finds her pictorial material online when she doesn’t take her own photographs. She sources images for D&R and sometimes sends Ant a selection to portray. Jasia’s prints, without ever being too obvious or obnoxious, could pass as AI-generated — but if you look at them closely, you understand they aren’t. So instead of looking at something and asking yourself if it's real and then finding out that it’s AI, you do the opposite: you look at something that you think is AI, but it’s not. It’s real. And there’s even a layer of makeup on the surface. Notice how the artist’s mixing plate is a palette is a makeup palette.
At times I tell myself Jasia’s pictures look even more like paintings than Ant’s paintings. I’m not sure about Jasia’s small altar display sculptures though but that’s ok because I think Jasia wasn’t entirely sold on them either. They work as a nice complement to the rest of the show. They ornament and display ornaments, luring us in with a shop window logic, e.g. dried seahorses laying on Bobbi Brown lipstick cases, a set of keys, coins stacked next to a carved and stylized ‘One Love’ inscription. They work great as set design elements or aesthetic bait but maybe that’s the point. I loved the rest of the show so I don’t really care.
Between Brooklyn and London, photographer and curator Alex Arauz builds a quietly
powerful body of work that explores how identity is formed in domestic space. Through
exhibitions, curatorial projects and film initiatives, he asks how the places we live – and the
images we make within them – shape who we are.
The quiet politics of domestic life
Alex Arauz’s photography unfolds in intimate spaces – the lived-in rooms and private
corners that carry the traces of who we are. Working between Brooklyn and London, Arauz
uses photography and moving image to ask how identity takes shape within the domestic,
and how memory lingers in the ordinary. His work slips between editorial and art practice,
between images made for magazines and those made for quiet reflection. The result is a
body of work that feels grounded, familiar and deeply human. “The home,” his images
seem to say, “is where identity is rehearsed, performed and remembered.”
“Arauz’s photographs don’t seek spectacle; they hold a kind of stillness,
inviting the viewer to slow down and notice the ordinary.”
Waste Store, 2023 – Looking at the city from inside
In early 2023, Arauz exhibited as part of I Wonder How Many People in This City, a group
show at Waste Store curated by Isabel Kang. The title alone captures a tension that runs
through Arauz’s work – how we live together, yet remain apart, in the fabric of a city. His
contribution to the show didn’t depict the city directly. Instead, it turned inward. The rooms,
objects and light that fill his frames speak of urban experience at its most personal: the
half-open doorway, the rumpled bed, the soft flare of sunlight through a curtain. These are
not portraits of the metropolis, but of what the city feels like from within.
Emalin, 2024 – Screens, memory and everyday rituals
A year later, Arauz’s practice took another turn inward with his contribution to One for
Sorrow, Two for Joy at Emalin (July–August 2024), curated by Lauren Auder and Tosia
Leniarska. The exhibition transformed the gallery into a living room – a sofa, a television,
two speakers – a gesture that blurred the boundary between public exhibition and private
viewing. Arauz presented OOBE – Out Of Body Experience, a video piece that extends his
fascination with interiority and the act of looking. The title nods to that strange state of
observing oneself from outside, as though memory has slipped into the present.
Curating the scene – Ginny on Frederick and beyond
Arauz’s curiosity about images extends beyond his own photography. He has also played
an active curatorial role in London’s independent art landscape, helping to guide the
programme at Ginny on Frederick, a small but influential gallery celebrated for its
experimental approach and commitment to emerging voices. By contributing to the
gallery’s curatorial direction, Arauz helped foster a platform that embraces experimentation
and risk – the same qualities that shape his own work.
Waiting Room Film Festival – nurturing new voices
Arauz is also a founding member of the Waiting Room Film Festival, a grassroots platform
for experimental and artist-led moving image. The festival has become known for
championing early work from artists who later shape new directions in contemporary film
and video art. Among those shown is Josiane M.H. Pozi, whose early films found a home
at the festival. Pozi has since gained wide attention for her diaristic approach to
image-making – weaving together fragments of daily life, digital memory and the
representation of Black identity. Her rise reflects the kind of raw, authentic talent that
Waiting Room was designed to support.
Arauz’s curatorial and photographic work share the same ethos: an
attention to the overlooked, and a belief that quiet observation can be a
radical act.
What ties Arauz’s activities together – as artist, curator and organiser – is an
understanding of the everyday as a space of meaning. In his editorial work, he brings
sensitivity and texture to fashion portraiture; in his gallery projects, he turns that same
sensibility toward introspection. He approaches the home as an emotional landscape
rather than a static setting. His rooms are charged with feeling, and his subjects – whether
people or places – exist somewhere between presence and absence.
The art of attention
Across exhibitions, festivals and curatorial projects, Arauz offers an antidote to the noise of
contemporary visual culture. His practice encourages slowness and care, inviting the
viewer to linger on a patch of light, a familiar room, or a fleeting expression. In an age of
speed and saturation, Arauz’s work insists on attention – on the idea that seeing carefully,
whether through a lens or across a community, is itself a form of art.
