When Tiqqun wrote their Theory of the Young Girl, some people pointed out that it was a bit misogynistic, using the assumed vacuity, emptiness, and ultimate energetic frivolity of women and girls in the West as both an analogy, a mode, and a mask that governments, men in suits and anyone (?) under late-stage capitalism can don at any moment. Why always dolls and not women, like cmon now.

As Lou Reid explains, Egner's paintings incorporate the mass-market with the acceptable pre-war pedo vibes of Balthus in a manner that could be read as "relatable" for contemporary femininity. But the young girl, or the doll, can't ever just be a vessel, and is more of membrane, bearing the trace of its observer, or theorist, or painter, who doesnt wash their grubby little hands before handling.

Anyway, post-impressionist paintings of dolls...

— Syd

There is desire, a burning passion for the all-too-real and ultimately unattainable, and there are one-dimensional figments of the imagination – undeveloped castles in the sky to be drooled over, lest any intricacy ruin the dream. Jeff Egner’s recent show “Guest Room” at Lomex dances the line between the former and the latter, conjuring scenes of strange, lurid intimacy with well-heeled influences and unrefined (yet enthusiastic) figurative techniques.

Across twelve oil paintings almost exclusively depicting dolls and feminine playthings, Egner oscillates between the high and low-brow, attempting to merge the (tastefully) suggestive language of Balthus’s children with the more brusque obscenity of the mass-market Temu sex robot. Take Untitled (Room III), 2025, a work depicting a seemingly inanimate girl bent over a table, offering a glimpse of her underwear as she looks directly back at the viewer. Her body is posed unnaturally – her club foot at the end of her outstretched leg bends at a bizarre ninety-degree angle, and her only visible arm twists around her back before disappearing behind her upturned second foot. At the bottom of her raised leg, a mass of thigh resting on the table accumulates into an abhorrent puddle. Two seams appear at the top and bottom of the contorted arm’s elbow joint, definitively marking the figure as a fleshy cast of silicone stretched around a Barbie-like series of pins and bolts. An easy comparison can be drawn between Untitled (Room III) and Therese Dreaming, 1938, a Balthus painting of a young girl daydreaming while exposing her underwear beneath her arched leg. This is a provocative theme, and any work influenced by the voyeuristic gaze of the adult male on the helpless girl must tread carefully lest it cross over into the realm of the flagrantly exploitative. Egner meaningfully tweaks Balthus’s unrepentant examination of his sitter with a healthy dose of self-admonishment, positioning the doll to look back at the viewer, implicating them in their overt sexualization of the figure. The tension (and thrill) of the Balthus work is absent, and instead replaced by the shame and contemplation akin to a fleshlight collector memorialising his own perversion, turning his urges inward and mixing his lust with an unshakable embarrassment. To so obviously fetishise the inanimate qualities of the doll is to take away from its uncanny appeal, and render an otherwise complex being disappointingly flat.

In Swallow’s Nest, 2025, meanwhile, two women appear before a picturesque castle in a crudely painted scene, haunted by a floating male visage. Appearing somewhere between a reflection of a face on a glass pane and the ominous floating phallic rhino horns which crowd the female subject of Dali’s Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity, 1954, the face watches over the women with startling proximity, as though the cloud-like lines which define its hair and brow will soon be breathed in by the girls. The taller woman, wearing a crop top and short shorts, leans against a railing. The other sits on a stone ledge, crossing her bare feet and closing her eyes in a slump. While the painting overtly sexualises the Barbie-like figures of the two women, it is less a piece of toe and leg worship than a fetishisation of detachment, a work dedicated to the “cool girl” as a figure which can be observed yet never approached. Dali referred to Young Virgin as the most chaste of his paintings, in spite of the penis-dream’s paradoxically “erotic appearance”. Egner lands on a similar feeling in Swallow’s Nest, bringing a male figure into a painting in the most ineffectual, flittering manner possible – while the women could breathe in the wispy vapours of the face, they could just as easily turn and blow them away. The delicacy of this relationship is, however, jeopardised by the cardboard-cutout inertia of the women. Painted as placid amazons in fantasyland, they are frustratingly disconnected from the unstable encounter Egner is anticipating.

This is not to say that Egner is incapable of producing complex and captivating work: In Her Blue Dream, 2025, a female figure in a schoolgirl’s uniform looks longingly to her side, straining her right hand to play with the fabric of her sleeve. The woman’s pupil-less eyes do not rest on the viewer, but out a window, conveying disappointment or yearning for something outside the scene. Her face carries more emotion than any of the other inanimate personages here, and her body is posed in an avoidant stretch. The question of the figure’s animation is the painting’s greatest success, highlighting the importance of Egner’s rendering of his girls in the success or failure of his unsettling tableaus. Unlike the mottled and flat daubs which comprise the majority of the show’s works, Her Blue Dream is painted in long smooth strokes, emphasising the drape of the figure’s arms and floes of hair. It appears as though Egner has positioned his doll to reject his advances, engaging the productive tension between each inanimate yet uncannily attractive doll to question the root of his desire. Here – at last – Egner imagines the doll as being able to say no, and produces a portrait instead of another silicone still life.

Teo has the time and energy to go places in London that our editorial team (who are all ex-vice staff in their late thirties) do not. One of these places is Christ Dillinger and Acid Soulja Boy's jacked-up internet rap that really makes ur brain go WHUUUURRR WHUUUUURRR WHUUUURRRR. Keywords: Hikkokimori; Tung Tung, EDM Beats.

Christ, we know ur real name.

When Keir Starmer sucker-punched British teens with a social media ban, I was left paranoid about the future of music. Albeit uplifted by the rappers’ chimerical charisma, Acid Souljah and Christ Dillinger’s London show felt like a spirited requiem to a subculture epitomised by its severely plugged-in teenage fans and innovators.

Outside The Garage, himkimori’s are hitting vapes from the black market and crying “Tung Tung Tung Sahur is so leng” after he came out on stage for bloodonmybalmain’s set. The bouncers don’t bat an eye when my friend and I promise we’re on the guest list and sneak in while Acid Souljah is mid-verse, rapping every bar in a falsetto that makes him sound like a slacker yelling at his parents from his gaming set-up.

This doesn’t feel like the usual underground rap (whatever that means now) extravaganza; barely any phones are in sight and the moshing etiquette is surprisingly considerate, which also means it’s appropriately and absolutely frenetic in there. The compound of Acid Souljah’s hilariously cunning bars and the sheer bounce of the music draws a twisted grin on my face; there’s something exhilarating yet uncanny in seeing such a mythical subject from my fyp in the flesh. You can tell he’s been performing for years now, and when the music is so authentic, the swag follows: naturally.

Joining Acid, Christ Dillinger glides onto the stage in a green Vetements shirt that droops down to his ankles — his silhouette harks back to a faded memory of a 2000’s MC. Inaugurating his utopian American party is X MAN, which entices an eclipse in the enthusiasm of the crowd, charging in droves towards the rapper. As he waltzes and nods about, a colourful contrast is cast between his virtuosic, based flow and the infectiously funky EDM beats he’s barring on.

Whether he’s expertly listing drugs or flexing his after-hours endeavors, Dillinger injects his music with a fluency in online-humour that never betrays his integrity. In between songs, an edited version of the trapaholics tag warns us,“This song is fucking is horrible.” Freud believed that collective laughter occurred at the breaking down of authority — that seems to be happening a lot tonight.

I get goosebumps when a vulgarly ear-stimming trance beat drops after the MC candidly confesses: “The only opp I got is depression”. Diving into the mosh for a few minutes and fulfilling a kid’s request to end the show on the triumphant and familial note of “based world mansion”, Dillinger proves he is as unaffectedly committed to his fans as they are to him.

The rappers share the stage with their friends; they want the lights off; they pause the music for water breaks; and launch free Palestine chants. Based negative squad CEOs assured me that youth culture can only endure.

The Jaded cosmopolitan multiculturalists long for the orientalised pseudo-monoculture of ‘the north’, and what they come up with is “Club Nite” at Village Underground. This is not so much a review of Clubnite as a club night; Olivia Twist turns her attention to the club decorations, courteously provided by the so-eminently-crap-it-almost-goes-without-saying artist Corbin Shaw. What was the deal with this ironic nationalist boy’s club of a club night? - HSR

It's not often that people actually talk about the decoration of clubs anymore, since unfortunately we as a culture have succumbed to the plain black quasi-warehouse: boring bland and industrial. The idea that an artist would collaborate with a club night to decorate their walls is therefore an appealing idea. However, the delivery makes me wonder whether its worth even hoping for good things to happen. To think! at the time, the world cup was still a month away.

A note on the aural/oral before we get into aesthetics. The sets were good and fun: Mysrry (DJasianbarbie) made her debut set. A big highlight was Taylor Richardson’s featuring a mix of esoteric computer guided remixes with cassö, RAYE, D-Block Europe - Prada (STAR SEED & PIERCE Remix) and an EsdeeKid-4 Raws Budot edit, Rihanna Hit List (Bassline Remix) and I have Nothing, Big G. Drunk in Love Diplo Remi; Lancer Victorious Honey Buns; Murder Club Nirvana & Cardi B Remix, a set list rooted in the online, or as he likes say: “I just play music”. Big up Paritos’s set and organisational verve.

This was promptly followed by BoyPillow (1 of the three founders of premier e-girl and -boy clubbing event, Maxxxing) who downed a bottle of Henny while playing his signature High BPM High bass tracklist. The eminent if-you-know you know Bailey Holmes Music’s USB was corrupted, so the same track kept running back, over and over again, until he MC’ed over Jenny Spark’s dope two-hour set. The act of inviting memes like OGMeathead (who didn't even turn up) and mixing them with other artists smacks of this weird exotica-approach that people from London have about Bradford MC type music. It’s annoying.

I have been to insanely good MC type nights. I have seen Marky B kick the soundguy in the face after only one song. But these kinds of things do not happen in hipster-adjacent spaces.

So yeah, the Corbin Shaw Flags. The club was filled with them. One huge one behind the decks that said “Clubbing” then a bunch of others dotted throughout Village Underground emblazoned with phrases like “tart”, “Filler”, “2014” and “Klarna”. It was unclear if the DJs got briefed that they’d be playing beneath twenty St. George’s flags during a historic upswing of the Xenophobia-fuelled Reform party that is threatening to ‘deport’ or exile hundreds of thousands of our loved ones.

Corbin’s flags remind me of those nihilistic affirmation instagram accounts littered with phrases like “my country is so psychologically stable” or words like “lit” overlaying AI gen rainforests and squashed pics of Ed Sheeran. AI’s evolution from the visuals of DALLE-1 to realistic deep fakes relegated these affirmation pics to the internet graveyard. But these flags summon them back, reading similarly to Corbin’s recent AI-influenced campaign poster for SXSW festival that reads “REEL LIFE” over an image of Stone Henge filtered through the “impressionism” prompt on Adobe Express. They give nostalgia for recent years swiping at instagram affirmation images on an iphone 5c fused with some kind of affirmative pseudo critique painted on a crusader knights shield.

“Nobody knows what it means, but its provocative.” – Blades of Glory

What is more provocative is perhaps the feeling of being on drugs in a club with sexy people, in a sexy environment. Instead we were mired within empty, basic irony because of the flags, which people kept looking at, feeling weirded out by.

Exemplary of the power of instagram to give soft power to the most shallow and unresearched work, it sanitises the violence, suffering and anxiety endemic to contemporary British life. Shaw smoothes down anger into the barest of worded signifiers. Using the same dumbed-down visual language of his object of critique speaks to Corbin Shaw's poverty of imagination, that starves the brain like a nitrous oxide balloon, except in a bad way. In his world, we are fed only the rehashed codes of an easy liberal target: ‘nationalism’. Whatever that means for England, satellite state of Palantir.

It doesn’t help that Village Underground has the shape and feel of a WW2 bunker.

Not to labour the point too much, but it felt ketty-fascistic.

I love tarts and I love clubbing. Clubbing tarts should have far more power in this country. As concepts they shouldn’t be sloganised and put on a crap piece of bonehead art.

Superstar leaves you with two messages: Justice for my tartiness! AND, let’s respect clubbing! Leave St George out of it.

When we covered the show at the cause last year, a week after LV Sandals came out, we predicted the invasion of the UK underground into the mainstream. A year on, we have seen the mixed results of this success, epitomised in the success and unsuccess of Essdeekid post-Capitol records deal, and here with this alternately banging and uncertain, slightly pretentious release from Fakemink. We can hope for a British invasion, but we have to fear the possibility that Britain becomes a site of cultural extraction in service of the empty American imperial core.

Thank god we have Teo to guide us. Find here, the return of our high school music reporter. Here he dishes his opinions, as the superstar does: with panaché and natural online research-habitus.

Terrified is fakemink’s synthesis of the terror beneath the pride with which he lives his self-prophesied life. The Essex boy faked it till he made it; the fantasies of Hollywood and fragrances he seduced my generation with are real now.

Between the opening instrumental and spoken-word finale, he revisits his older sound – hazy beats, ranty verses and hypnotically jarring hooks – but with a confidence that was absent from the angst-punctuated songs he blew-up with. Retard Angel drowns a Tirzah sample under, like, a million layers of effects and bass; the haunted trap beat on Wrong Relief feels terrifying after the danceable fyp anthem Night, Blooming Jasmine (not-so-politely taking its name from Lynch’s grave); and 51 Ttashpel Pony Ave proudly recalls the jerk-beats the rapper used to release in industrial quantities. But underlying the aesthetic sensibility and chaos that mark the prodigal rapper so distinctly is an eerie feeling of fame-induced apathy. His unrelenting flex of having “lived out the chateau” testifies the extent to which he has been consumed by the LA lifestyle.

The occasional confessions, “Miss Marmont driving me crazy” and “fuck Sunset, really miss Mayfair” remind us of how distant the London Saviour has become. Essdeekid got an eye-watering deal when he entered the LA Capital Records deathstar and his music payed the price. He was immediately paired to prop up the acts of yesteryear aka. the floundering Yeat, dropping a god-awful track from a Rap Caviar type producer. Almost instantly, the vitality of his image became like the hair care gummies plugged by an ex-love island reality tv star. It’s a cautionary tale that Mink has yet avoided, but still creates a bad taste in the mouth by association. Indeed, there is a jarring contrast between the phone scrolling in a dark room night-time feel of Mink’s music and the much-publicised awkwardness of his bright sun-lit performances on the post-millennial mainstream festival circuit. How long does it take to get back from Rolling Loud to London Fields?

With Terrified, fakemink tries to evolve beyond the single, which he has mastered over the last 2 years, and arrives at a broader scale of storytelling - one which fakemink places Victoria Davidoff at the centre of. The 9-fingered Soundcloud princess clutching a pole and hiding behind the curtains of Chateau Marmont in the cover is a muse in fakemink’s tragedy. Her demented dance and grin at the end of the Like A Virgin music video reminds me of the Virgin in Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary, who achieves liberation and transgression in the final scene by putting on lipstick. Victoria is a figure of fantasy in his Mulholland Drive-esque dream, and like Dante’s Beatrice, a remote crush deeply written into his lament.

It’s no surprise the self-proclaimed genius has directly named Lynch and Dante’s Inferno as inspirations. Comparisons are certainly not warranted, but they signify fakemink’s ambition which, much like the album, treads thin ice between visionary talent and self-indulged redundancy. It feels like fakemink has a tendency to be infatuated with things he can’t quite grasp, whether it be art, fame, Victoria Davidoff or himself. This perplexity is glaring on the sadistically titled Retard Angel, perhaps the most discordant moment on the album narrating a love story turned rotten as mink cries foul play.

Despite his claim that the tracklist simulates Dante’s Divine Comedy, beginning in hell (lustful subject matter etc.) and resolving in enlightenment (naively signified by the erasure of low frequencies and drums), the conflict at the core of terrified is not so easily resolved. The final song “Etna .” replaces Enzo’s bars with Victoria Davidoff’s uncanny attempt at a British accent, who warily considers:

“So here we are, a little older, a little wiser, and slightly embarrassed about the theatrics, but alive, which all things considered is not a bad outcome right?”

You wonder how self aware fakemink is of his own image, to invite both a muse and a creative director to collaborate with him so closely on an album that de facto ends up hiding its more thoughtful, introspective poetry behind her mystique. While hits scattered across the tracklist recall the swag the savant-level rapper bulldozed into the scene with, it feels like fakemink is asking himself questions he can’t answer as he takes a hubristic leap and, in the end, finds himself stuck mid-air.

Link to the Josef Strau essay is here.

For those who say we only write about Reena Spaulings, here is another stick with which to beat us with, and then yourself. What would you rather hear about, Marcel? Josef? Bloody, Jordan Wolfson? Charles Ray? Semi-abstract figurative painting by slade graduates?!?!? No, you're right. We're naughty. This is the last one, promise x sorry reena.

No, in all seriousness, please point to our floors. We are all ears to the подполья.

No, just kidding - this review was pitched and it was really good - sometimes exhibitions, by virtue of their strength, actually enclose into a worthy review. Equally true of bad shows, harder to say for mid shows.

Anyway, with Jeremy, we have taken an unprecedented leap and allowed him to employ footnotes.

FOOTNOTES:

- The pretends of NYC group shows to install gallery backbenchers alongside new, trendy consignments.

- The identification of Post aspiration and post-professionalisation artists in older figures such as Seiji Inagaki kind of reflects what it is to be just any unrecognised artist. Just graduation is post-aspirational, a non-act.

- People always have, and always will, love Jean Genet.

Sydney

“By linking my production to your production, the curator also disconnects us both”: I kept returning to that old, half-remembered line – drawn from an old, half-remembered John Kelsey essay – while viewing On the Never-Never, a group show at Reena Spaulings, curated by Tenko Presents. (1) Exhuming shopworn pieces from the depths of Reena’s storage (Stephan Dillemuth, Danny McDonald, Josephine Pryde) and suturing them to works representative of the roving Tenko program (Thomas Cap de Ville, Seiji Inagaki, Sabina Maria van der Linden), On the Never-Never positions the group show format as a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, an experiment toying with spare or dead parts. Can they all be brought together and restaged, and ultimately imbued with new life? If the show indeed comes alive, it does so by way of devices intrinsic to the artworks themselves: through shoddy assemblage, tasteless juxtaposition, and rough-hewn montage, through forced combinations redolent of a bad skin graft or a rejected organ transplant.

Poor things – “unproductive, wasted meaningless, excluded from historical narratives, endangered by the prospect of complete erasure,” as Sabina Maria van der Linden’s undated poster states – these works remake Frankenstein as a kind of kitchen sink drama, a no-budget Mike Leigh film. The storyboard is provided by Thomas Cap de Ville’s Book 1 and Book 2, both 2017, a pair of oversized scrapbooks arranged on a clothed card table. With the tactile feel of a duct-tape wallet, Cap de Ville’s books document a gritty, heroin-shaped life we were promised by the exhibition’s title (an alternate title, playing on both US and UK definitions, might have been On the Nod.) They are composed of disposable camera prints and digital images printed on copy paper, print-outs of aughts-era horoscopes and dating webpages, sometimes framed by tacky patterned craft papers; chronicling a misspent youth at the advent of social media, but also comment upon it humorously in retrospect. The noon-until-noon binges, the stupid pranks and long-forgotten acquaintances, compiled years later, in a form evoking the mild-mannered family album. At least one page, featuring an image of a dreadlocked Cap de Ville, is completed by a cigarette burn. Yet in prizing unruly formal experimentation over careerist common sense – folding terrific standalone photographs, for example, into a far less saleable form – these scrapbooks also supply the exhibition with its overarching ethos of poignant anti-ambition.

If we’re still in mind of the monstrous mash-up, there’s Danny McDonald’s Midnight Snack Encounter, 2014, which reads as a counter to the current vogue for conceptual sculpture. An Emperor Palpatine figurine leers at another of Twinkie the Kid, ensconced in a distressed sofa reminiscent of the after-after party. But the Twinkie figure carries a secret – he holds an actual Twinkie, by now possibly twelve years old.

Like any good artist right now, McDonald lists every material in the work’s details, including the long inventory of ingredients deployed in the Twinkie’s production and (maybe eternal) preservation. (2) There are also two assemblages from 2015 by Stephan Dillemuth, who once ran the storied Cologne space Friesenwall 120 with artist Josef Strau. Both sculptures are grounded by plaster cogwheels, and both are interrupted by a number of self- or scene-referential objects – the cast of a forearm, a burner phone affixed to a “bad” golf-leafed painting, the 2014 Gallerists issue of Texte Zur Kunst.

All of these things are embedded in the middle of the cogwheels, rather than between the gears, indicating that they aren’t really disrupting anything, not least in the present. Like the mostly reclusive, mostly middle-aged artists of On the Never-Never, these objects are closer to vestiges of an evaporated discursive zone, haunting the system once again through reappearance. Likewise, in a suite of exhibited photographs, taken from Josephine Pryde’s series Just What is Aura Anyway? (2006) a young girl is presented as a Victorian maid on Boxing Day, if the yuletide setting is to be believed. As in Jean Genet’s play The Maids (1947), Pryde’s role-playing maid serves here as an ambivalent figure, even a stand-in for a certain type of identity-fluid (young/old, rich/poor, now/then) artist LARPing faintly at systemic upheaval.

Although most of the artists included here have by now settled into a post-aspirational, post-professionalised groove of artistic production, one outlier might be the illustrator Seiji Inagaki, whose pervy, noncey, Pierre Klossowski-summoning drawings from the 1980s and 90s, for early Japanese gay magazines like Barazoku, have been tastefully framed and effectively upcycled, recirculated within a quainter, more “bohemistic” – to borrow a phrase from Dillemuth – economy of objects and images. We might spend some time thumbing through the original magazines, too, and lament, as with Cap de Ville’s books, a rich visual culture lost to the flattening effects of social media, a culture taken from us, in this instance, by Grindr. Variously presaging the more recent practices of Julien Ceccaldi, David Rappeneau, and Shogo Shimizu, Inagaki’s illustrations, and the queer culture they emerge from, derail us from the show’s predominant concerns while proposing yet another clever detour.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the reigning paradigm of the New York group show, which seeks to elevate the staid offerings of gallery backbenchers by smuggling in a few elder or late statesmen on consignment (a different, more optimistic type of never-never). A Harun Farocki video here, a Karen Kilimnik painting there, maybe a minor piece by Andrea Fraser or even Peter Hujar, and suddenly the inherent vacuity of the commercial group show is absolved, or at least optimised for dissemination online.

Such conditions seem ripe for a moment to reconsider Josef Strau’s essay “The Non-productive Attitude,” 2006, exemplified to some degree by many of the artists on view, alongside other models of artistic “badness” more broadly. (3) What could it be like, conceivably, to revisit these strategies today, for the Tenko generation? “So embarrassing,” Strau preemptively concludes, although this show gently suggests otherwise.

1. The pretends of NYC group shows to install gallery backbenchers alongside new, trendy consignments.

2. The identification of Post aspiration and post-professionalisation artists in older figures such as Seiji Inagaki kind of reflects what it is to be just any unrecognised artist. Just graduation is post-aspirational, a non-act.

3. People always have, and always will, love Jean Genet

1. John Kelsey, “Unclaimed Bags Will Be Destroyed,” in Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 221–234.

2. Danny McDonald, Midnight Snack Encounter, 2014. Materials listed by the exhibition checklist: Emperor Palpatine action figure (vinyl, fabric, sound), miniature snacks and games (vinyl, plastic), antique salesman's sample couch (fabric, wood), Twinkie The Kid Twinkie storage container (plastic, vinyl), miniature carpet (nylon), string, Twinkie (Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour [Flour, Reduced Iron, B Vitamins (Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid)], Corn Syrup, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Water, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening (Soybean, Cottonseed and/or Canola Oil, Beef Fat), Whole Eggs, Dextrose. Contains 2% or Less of: Modified Corn Starch, Glucose, Leavenings (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate), Sweet Dairy Whey, Soy Protein Isolate, Calcium and Sodium Caseinate, Salt, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60,Soy Lecithin, Soy Flour, Cornstarch, Cellulose Gum, Sodium Stearoyl Lacylate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Sorbic Acid (to Retain Freshness), Yellow 5, Red40), wood plinth.

3. Josef Strau, “The Non-productive Attitude,” in Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1–4.

Dirk Diggler is a man about town. He was #there with Laura Les. Crimes. Etc. A time when Hollywood Sups were still watching nickelodeon. But he's back now - for the return - and he says it's angry. Pregnancy is pissed, not abortive. Chloe is wearing a tam o' shanter with ultra maximalist yelling piercing screaming barely breathing takes. Governor vomit is sat on the ground with a pedal as she chest bumps the crowd.

Thanks dirk, another stinger from the diggler.

Pregnancy are fucking sick btw.

Currently sitting in an airport lounge, in many respects the epicentre of western civilisation, waiting to go into the sky, all is wipe-clean, smooth, 100% surveilled. Everyone has been x-rayed, scanned, recorded, photographed and ID'd, so I can be very sure this is me, sitting here, alone, it's utterly peaceful, boredom is total, the apex model of how society is becoming. I have time now to reflect on one of the most urgent, stimulating, hectic, angry, stunning gigs I've been to, well since the last time I saw Pregnancy at Reject All, organised by Ruth Angel Edwards and Adam Gallagher, the week before.

The Cafe Oto gig, hosted by the always brilliant TLC23 (Keira Fox and Katie Shannon) took place on good Friday, we dont need Jesus's suffering to stand as a representation of sacrifice. The current world view of horrific slaughter in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Iran is way more than enough. The murder lovin' billionaires are inflicting their selfish desires for yet more unimaginable wealth, their greed is our suffering.

Anger is the mood, the age of rage is now. Pregnancy boil this fury down into 3 minute bursts of frenzied hyper punk pop. Maugile and Governor Vomit have crafted their sound from what may have been left over from the semi demise of Hyperpop's mini era of the 2010's culminating in the outstanding Haunted by Laura Les in 2021. But Pregnancy take things further, much further. All the recent musical cores get condensed down into unrelenting hammers of rhythm and throbbing synth blasts that don't stop hitting, the feelings of terror and joy combine under this relentless pressure to force the mind to let go and release all concerns. Chloée leaves it all on the floor, so much so that by the final track she is literally glitching like a broken mp3 file, but it's in time with Governor Vomit's industrial strength barrage of ultra mega hyper maximalist total ear storm. The crowd can't help themselves, their willing madness bursts into deranged freedom, almost epileptically rejoicing in the totalpermission to not give a fuck. Not since the days of Sunrise raves or Butthole Surfer gigs have I been forced so urgently out of my own canister to join with the other souls with my sweat, screams, and rapture. Cafe Oto, being the considerate venue, hands out free ear plugs, I thought this was funny, condoms for the ears to avoid pregnancy? I recommend going comando, nothing should ever get in the way of such fucking brillance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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