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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Legacy: Lana Von Thorn, at Pivot

November 23, 2025 - January 18, 2026, London

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

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

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

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

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

I hate it here.

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

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

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

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

– I didn’t mean it like this.
– OK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One autist on another...

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

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

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

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

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

Germanness or Omni-Casuality at Maureen Palel by Dirk Diggler

Maureen Paley, Build from Here, Wolfgang Tillmans, 3 October – 20 December 2025 Sprüth Magers...

A late December Saturday afternoon trawl of galleries offering their end-of-year shows netted two specimens of note. Firstly: Maureen Paley, Build from Here, Wolfgang Tillmans. Maureen occupied 21 Herald Street for over two decades. She was moved out to make way for redevelopment six years ago; given the context of London’s post-2000s boom in crass, viral, "render-core" territorialisation, coming as it did shortly before Covid and the onslaught of Brexit, it was a sad state of affairs.

The actual space has some history from when Tillmans used it as his studio and hosted some very debauched parties there in the 1990s and 2000s; I recall a performance of drag queens giving a fake baby in its buggy a particularly rough ride. I once staggered out of one needing to buy some sobering crack, only to find myself driving down Whitechapel High Street on the wrong side of the road. Later, in 2011, Hotel gallery hosted a show of Keith Farquhar’s sculpture here; at the opening, I watched while a visiting writer snorted a couple of lines of morphine off one of the artworks.

But in these more somber times, the show isn’t really about the art; it’s more about the apparition of Paley’s return to Herald Street. There’s no mystery about the show; Tillmans is often used to herald the opening of one of her new spaces. It’s more her return—like Napoleon escaping from Elba—that interests me. This latest manifestation of her roster of galleries is a statement of intent, almost revenge. Entering the gallery, the first detail is the newly restored handrail of the balustrade: perfectly fitted, pale grey rubber. The fanatical painting of stairs and walls only prepares you for the first floor.

Stepping into the gallery, I thought, maybe I had died and was journeying through the tunnel of light to the afterlife, as I was hit by the force of the whitest, blindingly bright light my retinas have ever had to deal with.
Maybe ASML had installed a clean room, or I was coming to in an operating theatre after having been hit by a bus.
The extremist level of sterile clinicality burned into my consciousness; I could imagine a fly’s worst nightmare would be to have found its way in here on a balmy summer day with absolutely nowhere to hide.

The door to the office is an exact replica of the one from 21 Herald Street—it may even be the same door that has been sitting in storage for the last half-decade. Its polished stainless steel frame holds a single pane of toughened glass, and into this intense environment, a display of Tillmans' photographs, photocopies, and paper works lurks.

It’s hard not to see Tillmans' work as an exposure of him as a figure. In many ways, he is the German version of a YBA artist; coming of age as he did during that heated 90s era, he perhaps suffers slightly from a constraint common to much of their work: early success putting the brake on development.

Much of his output seems to rest in a self-contained appreciation that the spectator needs to "know," but in actual fact, like his British contemporaries, he seems stuck within a banality of his own making.
It ends up feeling like an echo of the worst of day-to-day German culture -—a kind of normcore, "omni-casual" style that hides a very thin interior.

It’s hard to think about his work (and there’s a lot of it) without simultaneously seeing the image of the artist himself as a clinician. In so being, the artist and his production help to back up the return of Paley to Herald Street in a fastidious examination of the accumulation of tedium that our present day will be noted for…

Meanwhile, in another part of town…

Seriously, Curated by Nana Bahlmann, 21 November 2025 – 31 January 2026

Seventy-one artists have been summoned into the show Seriously, curated by Nana Bahlmann. Sprüth Magers, along with their fellow mega-gallery owners, from time to time host group shows that easily rival those of museums—even if they are sometimes employed to contextualize their primary artists with historical works and test out fresh talent. ### This show is a "banger." One doesn’t need to compare it with a fellow group show around the corner at Pace (which is terrible); this one stands on its own as an utter tour de force—and I mean force, as in: open your eyes and get sucked in and off. There’s too much to really give it credit in the space of this short review.

Perhaps the biggest mention should go to the curator; Nana Bahlmann, each room makes utter sense without having to know why or read the press release. From the first work - —Andreas Gursky’s Desk Attendants, Provinzial, Düsseldorf, 1982, a work that literally welcomes you - —to each wall arrangement, the composition, balance, and juxtaposition are first-rate.

Running through the works on show, the carousel in my mind shutters one image after another: buried artist, large breasts, big tits, acid dissolving, dogs watching porn, dildos, toys, Elvis, Kiss, banana eating, smoking child, water towers…

While the idea of photography, as Barthes put it, was the noeme (the essence) - —which isn’t really correct anymore as AI is dissolving this myth -—it is most often the distillation of people into images, usually posing or caught candidly in front of the photographer. The resulting image is a document of the relationship between photographer and subject, probably best examplified by the upcoming Nan Goldin show, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, at Gagosian.

This show isn't that. This show is very funny, in part because the artists have really thought about the image they are making. It's not that photographers don't, but what they tend to do when "smudging" their subjects is rely on their personality as perceived by the subject, resulting in an intimate, personal moment that we spectators look on as a third party.

As witnesses giving light to our sense of observing a fellow being, we are caught in a moment of imagining ourselves in the scene -—a desire that almost immediately decays: gone forever, rendered unto death. But these artists, for the most part, are not doing this; instead, they have crafted into images the pause that humor needs to create the moment of confusion and wonder that jokes require in order to trigger the "LOL" response.

It would be impossible not to mention that among the works on show is Ceal Floyer’s work 644 (2025), which sees a photographed field of sheep, each being numbered, as if through a surveillance camera (totalling 644) believed to be one of her final pieces. She passed away a few weeks after the show opened, which brings the show’s reasoning sharply into focus: even someone who was regarded as "super serious" can be very funny.

What A Shit Show at Carl Kostyál
11.12.2025 - 17.01.2026

Last year I planned to write something about Callum Eaton. About how his photorealistic and life-sized paintings of ATMs, vending machines, lift doors and telephone boxes (openings in public space) cleverly messed with our ideas of surface and impenetrability. I was going to write that his paintings render in paint what Lauren Berlant calls capitalism’s ‘cruel optimism’: the way that it repeatedly offers us up a faint hope of passage to freedom whilst keeping us sliding endlessly across its greasy surface. Using Berlant to comment on these paintings is superficial: but now is the time of surfaces.

Public space is dominated by adverts, locked doors and shiny cladding that reaches all the way to the pavement. London is a hermetically smooth surface with no cracks to squirm through. I thought his paintings were about desire and fantasy in capitalism – of openings that appear to allow us a way beyond them but are just more surfaces (saying nothing of openings in other people’s bodies!). I was going to argue that Eaton’s paintings spoke to the claustrophobia I feel when I look at the screens in Picadilly Circus, or the empty shells of houses behind green park.

I was going to write that I thought that his paintings were witty – that they tricked the rich people who bought them into staring at a depressing trap of their own making. Their easy commodification was part of the critique.

But Eaton’s latest show at Carl Kostyál trades in the cleverness of his previous work for banality. He’s still making photorealistic paintings, except now he has ditched openings in public space as his primary subject – seemingly in favour of relatable moments (a lime bike?) and things that lend themselves to being painted photorealistically (a crashed car, a fire extinguisher, a parking ticket). There is no denying that the paintings look good, Eaton does photorealism well, but instead of the angular constraints and clean lines of his previous work we now get a series of paintings depicting a benign jumble of crumpled and shiny objects that do little more than showcase his technical ability.
Gone are the formal restraints found in his earlier work to only paint rectangular openings in public space. Now he can paint anything you like (read: commision), on a canvas perfectly matching its shape. This comes off as a gimmick.

If I had to try to redeem these paintings, I might write that the invention of gimmicks is the substance of neo-liberal life and that Eaton makes fun of this repetitive cycle of newness. To argue this I would point to Rear View (2025), a painting in which a man looks through a rear-view mirror at a car crash he has just avoided, the only one featuring a person. The viewer is the guy in the car, the archetypal subject of late-stage capitalism, always just escaping disaster and gliding towards the next gleaming thing that grabs our affect. Surfaceness doesn't get to us as long as we keep on moving. On this reading Eaton implicates us in the neo-liberal game of constant newness as we move through the gallery from painting to painting looking for a meaning which isn't there.

But the gap between satirical invocation and mere reproduction of capitals machinations is narrow. The show’s title: ‘This is a shit show’ indicates that Eaton fears he is on the wrong side of it. It’s overcompensation gives away the fact that there is not a shit in sight, there is no actual difficulty or discomfort for us in consuming his paintings, no real moment of crisis - just its fantasy. This is a clean line of product, vacuum packed and ready to be shipped. It’s a difficult line to walk, to be fair, making something popular and commodifiable that critiques its own commodification. Eaton is on the wrong side of it here, pivoting from the wry unctuous critique to providing the slick, oily, capital required to grease the wheels of the endlessly self-ironising collector.

Unlike Gili Tal’s Leperello work at Terminal Projects for example, which successfully incorporates adverts found on London’s hoardings (walls around building developments) to mime superficiality without replicating it.