It’s a Saturday evening. I’ve just finished work, and I’ve got a pint in my hand. After staring at a kitchen sink for most of the day, I’m looking forward to seeing Merlin Carpenter’s solo show David’s Soul at the Quality of Life Gallery in Glasgow’s West End, which I hope is going to be more exciting. As I wait for a friend to arrive, I check the gallery's Instagram bio which reads: “We are the best gallery in London, we just happen to be somewhere else” - I’m still struggling to decide whether this serves as a diss to Glasgow or just another instance of the exhausting Londoner-in-Glasgow attitude.

There’s the occasional self-imposed belief that they are the first to discover the city, and then proceed to go on to explain to everyone, including Glaswegians, about why Glasgow is so great. Being a student at the GSA, I’m all too well accustomed with the unfortunate inevitability of shittily painted cans of Tennents lager or the shallow holiday maker, arts and crafts-esque work by some of the relocated students. Although knowing Merlin Carpenter for his constant ability to avoid being categorised by style or subject matter, I know this show will be far removed from the former. My friend arrives, and we look at Google Maps to plan our route to the flat in which the show is taking place, only to be shown that the gallery is on the same street as us. Perfect.

I overhear an American voice confirming that I was probably in the right place. Heading up to the top floor of the tenement flat we are greeted with a dram of whiskey in true Glasgow fashion. We enter the living room of gallery owner Richard Parry’s family home where four Mercedes-Benz dual suspension patronise the carpet. I'm quickly airdropped to 1990s Cologne with Kippenberger et al. Present. The steeds are lined up in the centre of the room, taking the form of either trophy horses or the swaggering cool kids in the school playground. I sat down against the wall and began to read the fifteen-page press release. Around halfway through, I look up and see musician and artist Joanne Robertson get told off for grabbing the handlebars, which made me giggle. I too was wondering how well these bikes could do a wheelie. The press release serves as some form of ancient manuscript regarding the mystifying history of the bikes, their conception, storage and eventual delivery to the living room of Richard Parry. To quote from the singing voice of a mouse who had eaten its way through the bike's brake cables in the barn where the work was stored:

“I'm truly sorry Man's dominion, Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill/
opinion, Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An fellow-mortal!”

It feels only fitting for a press release of such length and esoteric nature to accompany Carpenter, who is also esoteric and lengthy in nature.

The bikes dominate the living room. It should feel like a salesroom of sorts, although Richard Parry's pastel blue walls mute that sterile feeling that we’re more used to experiencing. We can see Carpenter express his distrust for the art world as the bikes embody the flashy and cocky collector. Carpenter’s been known to criticise the art market before with his work, such as the painting slash performance The Opening (2007) at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in which he vandalised his own show, scrawling phrases like “DIE COLLECTOR SCUM” and “I LIKE CHRIS WOOL” across canvases. It’s quite clear that he struggles to come to terms with being a participant in the fried, shitty, circle-jerky viewing and buying domain that we all take part in. But, I think these themes become more apt when explored with less blatancy: in an obviously comsumer targeted, branded parternship, specialised object-artwork, like a mountain bike.

It seems as if I should have no connection to something as pointless or outwardly exorbitant as souped-up Benz bikes - I felt submissive to its glamorous and sharp aesthetics. They feel inescapable and ambiguous: similar to how BMW gatecrashes its way into high culture by sponsoring Art Basel. Something is troubling about seeing a non-art object collide into a high-end artefact, accompanied by the collective bewilderment of looking at eighty grand worth of bikes in someone else’s very nice living room. It’s here that Carpenter can engage us with his interests in Marxist Theory. I’m going to outline commodity fetishism again because it’s been long enough since our readership read theory.

The work references Marx’s theories on the transcendent value placed upon objects as they become commodities. This, in turn, disregards any value of labour required for the production of the objects. Carpenter presses this further as he re-authorises the readymade and, in turn, exploits the labour further, giving it a surplus of higher and more disillusioned value.

The pieces have previously been shown at Galerie Christian Nagel in 1999; Art Basel (2007) Kunstverein (2007). It's important to note this is the first time the work has been shown in almost 30 years. The white cube is becoming increasingly further from the status quo, and with that seems to come accessibility. Art is coming back into the hands of neighbours and being shown in kitchens, living rooms, old shops and basements.

Very few of us have reason or desire to go to Art Basel and turn on our bullshit sieve in the hope to see those one or two archive pieces we've been waiting for the IRL moment with. It’s exciting to start seeing more physically inaccessible art in less capitalised spaces. There's becoming a reduced us and them attitude regarding established and grassroots projects.

A review of "Banana Karenina" by The Pegram Collection and Alex Heard, which took place on a bridge in Archway last month.

I have 5 minutes at home to change into a dress adequately chic enough to fit my role as fashion show attendee. I am going to Bananna Karenina, a “performance featuring 9 dresses,” which will be staged on Sussex Way bridge, a no-where landmark vaguely in Archway.
To hold a show in public is to trust in the participants to behave when the hierarchy between audience and artist is removed. If vulnerability was hiding behind the texts of another man, the cracks in the lo-fi setting made the whole thing feel unassuming and human.
The show is a collaboration between artist Alex Heard and designer Mack Pegram, aka. The Pegram Collection. Described on Instagram as a museum in Buckinghamshire, a place random enough to blend into the brown and grey mush of Somewhere in England.
I make it to the bridge, where I am greeted by a horde of familiar faces I hardly ever get to see this far north of the river. The bridge overlooks a train track and I feel pride at recognising the reference despite never having read the book. Anna Karenina (1876) is one of those books that is so solidly book it feels you should have read it, haven’t read it, but probably really, actually have read it. It is like the bible, or Pride and Prejudice (1813).. If the railway was once a symbol of the modernising forces of industry, we now find them to be slightly ruined, going on as if they didn’t know how to stop.
People are holding pieces of paper and I. I want to get my hands on one. I ask someone where they got theirs, and I am interrupted by a youthful man in a suit who runs around the corner and emerges with a sheet for me. He is one out of two bow-tied servers carrying trays of water and wine. The servers wear suits for the very reason I am wearing my chic attire: servers wear suits.
Swooning music starts to play out of a boombox to my left, quiet at first and then loud enough to recognise it isn’t accidental and that the show is starting. The first model appears across the bridge. She is wearing a long and shapeless white robe, plain except for lines of black text which become legible as she gets closer. A friend speaks into a microphone and recites the text on the dress.
First, the front. Then, after the model turns, the back.
Though
Kitty’s
Toilette,
coiffure
and
all
the preparations
for the
ball had cost her
a good deal of trouble
and planning..
The next 8 models come and go similarly. The text appears in bursts of differently sized clusters, varying in dramatic and comedic effect.
Simple, natural, graceful - and, at the same time - gay and animated..
The words, ripped out of Tolstoy’s novel, are ready-made statements which have miraculously been given legs to walk on. No longer sitting next to Tolstoy’s characters, they can stand for everything.I feel that some of them are descriptors of the models themselves. Sometimes two words are placed together in a way that makes me laugh or seems to represent some distant truth that I know about the world. Or that I have been told I know about the world, and what our story is about, and how things go wrong, and so forth.
The models are styled in regency-era themed accessories: feathered boater hats, a basket of apples, twigs and other pastoral trimmings. An English re-reading of the novel’s original Russian setting. It’s 3pm on a Sunday in November and the sun is beginning to set over the bridge. When the music cuts in between songs, it is replaced by the rustling in the trees, the sound of wind blowing hair into the models’ faces and the fabric of their gowns in and around their legs, making it hard for them to walk. When the models pause long enough over the bridge, things seem still and I am tricked into feeling like everything fits and makes sense.
Families, lime-bikers and stray pedestrians are forced to meander their way through the obstacle course of cameras, speakers, and the bodies of former and current art students. One man, who looks smart enough to stage his own show, or has maybe gotten lost on his way east to join the other old and hatted eccentrics of London, is asking what this is all about – “it's a fashion show, I think.” A woman walks and runs as close to the edge of the bridge as possible, hoping to disappear into the brick, but this only makes the fashion-art-audience giggle harder. Others stop and will stay till the very end.
A man is filming the whole thing on his iPhone camera. Gliding around models and audience, up and down the catwalk. I learn later that this is one man out of a collective behind the Instagram account @27b.6_. I have seen their wordless and voyeuristic portraits of pedestrians before. The camera lingering uncomfortably long till their subject(s) start to crack in a Warholian screen-test fashion. The account representative was invited by the artists themselves; though they may not have anticipated him stalking the catwalk as he did.
When a bright orange train of the London Overground passes the tracks and the models change back into their preferred city attire, a leftover bouffant hairstyle will be the only reminder that the audience has seen any art at all. We scurry back into London’s walls.

Introducing the press release is Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. A helplessly romantic push toward self-affirmation, it also stages life as an absurd play of recurring archetypes, charged with the history that shapes them. The collection pokes fun at the city’s self-seriousness and fashion’s obsession with the future. Clothes are read too quickly, identities too fixed. Designed away from the city, the garments return mischievous, repeating our absurd metropolitan codes, but askew.

Mack is selling t-shirts on the table at the post-show reception. People are trying on the various prints, trying to find one that will fit their vibe. G puts on a tank top printed with a big “It” and M is happy with hers because the question mark at the end of the sentence will poke out of her cardigan in a nice manner. If the lines of text imitated the nonsense of optometric eye-tests, we are failing hard. The alphabet is to us only nice looking shapes, decorating a white backdrop.
Coming away from the show, I realise that I am wearing a '60s-vibe top and that my outfit is awfully charged. My outfit is the beige lint roller of all of history before me, and my '60s top is a ball of hair caught in its sticky tape.

Hollywood Superstar visits Hannah Taurins studio in Brooklyn. Represented by Theta gallery, Taurins paintings are a step forward for contemporary figuration, which can sometimes fall into the gutter between ironic grotesque john currin derivations and tired imitations of Francis Bacon's phantasmagoria. Taurins captures the archival impulse - media is an ouroborus - with the pechance and kitschness of Audrey Hepburns Funny Face (1957).

Her mannequins, her muses, are drawn from the torn pages of now defunct fashion magazines, or scans from the FIT library. She preserves the flaws of the copier in her pastels and gouache. Inspiration ranges from carefully curated wedding boards on Pinterest, to the editorials of brands like Kiko Kostadinov.

Taurins work, for this editor, when paired with the accelerating relationship between fashion and art, encapsulates the habits of a certain level of online personhood. Mining for information, for images, nostalgic or futuristic, through digital and traditional archival integration.

Hannah Taurins reminds us most of Francis Picabia, "He's such a freak" Taurins says, "I love him".

Her exhibitions, including solo show God, Let me Be Your Instrument (Theta, 2025) and Cabin Pressure (2025) on view at Air Service Basel. are dramturgical, following the rise, hubris and desire of her female protagonists.

Hollywood Superstar

How do you source images? What do you look for? There is a trend at the moment for artists working in both traditional and non-traditional mediums to search for slightly retro, editorial images on Pinterest. It's a new kind of source material. That and the mannequin trend, but I guess models are just mannequins, in a way.

Hannah Taurins

I’m not above Pinterest - it’s crazy - like for the next show I'm working on a bridal theme, and obviously, Pinterest is perfectly engineered for bridal planning.

You can often tell when the original poster is just a really passionate researcher with a scanner. I like to use libraries at FIT. Thefashionspot.com is a big one too. I follow a bunch of fashion magazine scan accounts on instagram. I used to use Flickr when I was using freakier, niche photos and was more paranoid about copyright. Deviant Art, too.

It’s tough because not every good photo is going to make a good drawing. That’s why I felt challenged by the Kiko Kostadinov images. They were such compelling photos, but hard to translate into compelling images.

With some works I have to take on more responsibility for the “why” of the drawing.

I used to not draw men at all, I just didn’t feel interested in it. This has changed for me recently. Lately I’ve been drawing men in a fantasy lover role! This has been lots of fun for me, and I think is a result of some recent healing. Plus I love men. Maybe before I felt as if to make a successful work I had to embody the subject, and I felt far away from men. But now I just love to put them in as a little vessel for desire.

HS

When you work, you’re drawing from a photocopy of the original photograph, so you're twice removed from the actual photographic scene. Your backgrounds, too, have a semi-abstraction in them, like you’ve captured the detritus on the surface of the photograph, or the glare on the camera lens.

HT

My images are distorted from the magazine. I like the idea of incorporating a glare or translating the glitch that comes with the photocopy. It’s exciting to me that you noticed that. Sometimes the decisions I make with color are a result of my printer running low on ink or something. But even to include a margin or to draw the stack of pages underneath the page with my reference.

HS

Do you feel like there's a trend in figurative painting, or drawing, toward using super niche internet language?

HT

I've felt this way since Tumblr. The source material feels like a natural part of my practice. I had a fashion makeup blog - which I deleted when I was in cringe mode. I pick the images in a way that I can say something about myself. For my last show at Theta, God, Let me be Your Instrument, it was about this groupie. She is following this musician around that she's enamoured by, and she reaches stardom, but then she falls, and she dies. It’s super personal, that story.

I remember in high school making paintings of screenshots from snapchat messages. My teachers hated it! They had no idea why I was doing it. I was fascinated by how my friends and I were communicating with each other.

HS

There is a painting of her called Groupies Live Forever, 2025 where her soul is coming out of her body - she finds herself spiritually reborn. How did the concept for this piece arise?

When I first thought of it, I knew the show would be about rock stars. All the images I had been compiling were fashion images referencing music. I thought the protagonist of the paintings could be a groupie. I did get my heart broken by a musician while making this show. I remember doing a walkthrough at the gallery with a drawing class from Princeton. I turned totally red when I told them the show was about my breakup. It was so vulnerable but that’s how I knew it was right for me to share. What better catalyst for personal transformation than love and heartbreak? This painting is about that. In life if you do it consciously I think one dies and is reborn many times.

HS

So what about the next show, the bride? That’s a kind of another nostalgic kick, bridal couture is such a specific niche but a huge industry, every Pinterest user can recount being accosted with a million bridal mood pages.

HT

I want to do a delusional bride. I’m building the storyline now - what is her character arc? I’m the age my mom was when she got married and had me. I’m curious about the fantasy of the perfect bride and holy union, and the anxieties surrounding that. I feel caught now more than ever between being a sort of perfectly self contained artist for the rest of my life, taking lovers, whatever, and really buying the marriage story.

There’s something there too about Jung’s Animus - the unconscious masculine in a woman. The first work I made with this show in mind was of a pregnant woman. It’s my fantasy about self-fertilization, the result of integrating all parts of oneself and achieving this kind of creative fertility.

HS

How do you feel like your practice and Instagram interact with each other? This idea of looking, being looked at. Your work have these female protagonists that appeal to a gaze - but also to a digital lens. Like, your paintings do well on Instagram. When your refiguring these photocopied images, or painting a steven meisel campaign, do you feel the gaze changes at all?

HT

I used to feel shameful about this, but I no longer do. Making work that does well on Instagram is important to me - fuck it. People have fantasies about what artists are like - my work is about meeting people halfway, creating things. That’s where desire comes in. I think viewers desire something naughty, an insight into me as a person, or into the artwork.

I am often looking for an energy - one for myself and one that I want to bring to the work, as well. It feels so earnest, it's my own creative and sexual desire, and if that's a traditional male gaze…then.

I think you can tell my work is made by a woman. I went to Cooper Union when it wasn’t super fashionable to be making sexy figurative work. It was conceptual work that went down easier there. I’ve gotten a few bad reviews - this vlogger went into my show and talked about this one work, Spread. He comes into the gallery and starts talking about the work, but doesn’t want to be told about it, he’s monologing like:

“I’ve just been seeing images of this painting all over Instagram, and had to come see it myself, it must be a fluke, it collapses modernism and postmodernism into one painting, and theres no way that Hannah Taurins could have been aware she was making such a brilliant move”.

Something about Barnett Newman, lines, abstraction and Courbet’s origin of the world. He just couldn’t give me the compliment. He couldn’t acknowledge the sensuality of the show for one second; he even described the painting as prudish.

Hannah Taurins work installed at Salon (October 16th-19th, 2025) by Hollywood Superstar, Chess Club and Gnossienne Gallery.

HS

Talk to me about your process of making. Do you ever paint from live models? Or only printed images?

I much prefer working from printed images because I can be kind of weird and intense in the studio. I like to get very stoned and listen to the same songs over and over again. I feel moved to draw at odd hours and can’t predict when I need to step away for a walk or a nap or whatever.

When I'm making work, this shift happens. I'll be looking at something and being so present in my body. I find that the hardest thing about my process is to let myself be that present, and when there's someone else in the studio, it's so much harder. I have to completely objectify them. There's a shift between looking at someone as a person in your studio, and breaking them down into shapes and lines.

And that switch doesn't happen when you paint from images?

HT

It’s almost automatic but once it happens, it feels like there is no separation from myself and the image. I am just a vessel for the work. I’m addicted to that space, and have been since I was a kid.

Hollywood Superstar publishes Italian director Pier Pasolini's Cosair writings (1973–75). These excerpts examine the international style of counterculture and the political adaptability of fashion via the infamous fascist long-haired males. The second extract is the conclusion to one of the more famous essays from the collection, which identifies the “new fascism” with its “pragmatic” and “American” style. The Corsair Writings remain remarkable, contemporaneous to Pasolini's final film, Sàlo (1975), which depicts the depths of fascist libertine depravity.

It has been nearly 50 years since Pasolini’s body was found on the beach at Ostia. In the film Amore Tossico (1983, dir. Claudio Caligari, Italy), two young heroin addicts overdose, draped together over the memorial to the director. Like the doomed characters of Caligari’s film, Pasolini’s posthumously collected Corsair Writings were written as raids on the public consciousness, steeped in the counter cultural capture of a moment when clandestine state actors were widely suspected of obscuring or enabling far-right terror, cultivating a sense of crisis that would come to define Italy’s long decade of uncertainty. This so called “strategy of tension" cannot be read in history books.

How do you categorise your average political assassin? Computers are seized by government agencies, who release the facts when and how it suits them. Can anyone be certain of the political signs that the Trump shooter, that the Charlie Kirk shooter, left floating in their virtual worlds? British police impregnated left-wing activists, the US government was all over 4chan, and the EDL still gets more cash from government agencies than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon knows what to do with.

This Anonymous Hollywood Superstar feels better for not believing MI5, but that’s just what they’d like...

When we can’t tell who is killing whom, or why, scapegoats are found and order must be seen to be enacted. Pasolini warns us of a “hasty” attribution of blame to those who are treated as “congenitally destined to become fascists,” the “eighteen-year-old boys… who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.” Young men are blamed for violence but immigrants are blamed more; the Prime Minister invokes the fear of the illegal worker to justify a totalitarian digital ID system. When the confusion is mundane, when the sense of disorder is complete, when communities are atomised, it is imagined that fear will make them cry out for their own suppression. But an enlightened public does not have to ask for any protection that they are not already capable of giving to each other, and that’s a fact.

"The Discourse of the Longhairs"

January 7, 1973. Published in Corriere della Sera under the title, “Against the Longhairs”.

The first time I saw longhairs was in Prague. Two young foreigners, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, entered the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. They walked across the lobby and sat down at a table in a secluded corner. They sat there for about half an hour, observed by the customers of the hotel, including myself, and then they left. The whole time they sat there, and as they walked through the crowded lobby of the hotel, neither of them said a single word (perhaps—although I don’t recall right now—they whispered a few words to each other: but I suppose if they did it was something strictly practical and pedestrian).

In fact, in that particular situation—which was completely public or social, almost official, so to speak—they did not need to speak at all. Their silence was strictly functional. And it was functional simply because words were superfluous. Both of them, in effect, used a different language from the one that is composed of words to communicate with those who were present, with the observers—with their brothers of the moment.

What replaced traditional verbal language, rendering it superfluous—and immediately finding its place in the broad domain of “signs”, in the domain of semiology—was the language of their hair.
In a single sign—the length of their hair flowing down over their shoulders— all the possible signs of an articulate language were concentrated. What was the meaning of their unspoken and exclusively physical message?

It was this: “We are two longhairs. We belong to a new human category that is now making its appearance in the world, which has its center in America and which is unknown in the provinces (for example—indeed, above all—here in Prague). We are therefore an apparition for you. We are performing our apostolic mission, filled with a knowledge that is both totally overwhelming and totally exhausting. We have nothing to add orally or rationally to what our hair says physically and ontologically. The knowledge that fills us, as we perform our apostolic mission, will belong to you some day, too. For the moment it is something New, a great Novelty, which generates, together with scandal, expectation in the world: it will not be betrayed. The bourgeoisie are right to look at us with hatred and terror, because the length of our hair constitutes an absolute contradiction of their ways. But don’t think of us as uneducated savages: we are well aware of our responsibility. We do not bother with you, we keep to ourselves. You should do the same and await the unfolding of events.”

I was the recipient of this communication and I was immediately able to decipher it: this language that lacked a lexicon, grammar and syntax could be understood immediately, because, semiologically speaking, it was nothing but a form of that “language of physical presence” that men have always known how to use.

I understood, and felt an immediate dislike for both of them.

Later, I had to swallow my hostility and defend the longhairs from attacks by the police and the fascists: I was, of course, as a matter of principle, on the side of the Living Theatre, of the Beats, etc.; and the principle that caused me to side with them was a strictly democratic one.

The longhairs multiplied—like the first Christians—but they remained mysteriously silent; their long hair was their only real language and they felt no need to supplement it with another. Their language coincided with their existence. Ineffability was the ars retorica of their protest.

What did the longhairs say, with their inarticulate language that consisted of the monolithic sign of their hair, between 1966 and 1967?

They said: “Consumer civilisation nauseates us. We are protesting radically. We are creating an antibody against this civilisation by way of our refusal. Everything seems to be going smoothly, right? Our generation is supposed to be integrated, right? But take a look at how things really stand. We refuse to accept the insane fate of becoming ‘executives’. We are creating new religious values within bourgeois entropy, precisely at the moment when it is turning secular and hedonistic. We are doing this loudly and with revolutionary violence (the violence of the nonviolent?) because our critique of today’s society is total and intransigent.”

I don’t think that, if they were to be interrogated in accordance with the traditional system of verbal language, they would have been capable of expressing the meaning of their hair so articulately; but that is essentially what they said. As for me, although I have suspected ever since then that their “system of signs” was the product of a subculture of protest that was opposed to a subculture of power, and that their non-Marxist revolution was suspect, I still stood by their side for a while, finding a place for them at least in the anarchic element of my ideology.

The language of these longhairs expressed, although ineffably, Leftist “themes”. Maybe those of the New Left, born within the world of the bourgeoisie (in a dialectic that was perhaps artificially created by the Mind that rules, beyond the consciousness of particular historical Powers, the fate of the Bourgeoisie).

Then came 1968. The longhairs were absorbed by the Student Movement; they protested with red flags on the barricades. Their language expressed an increasing number of Leftist “themes”. (Che Guevara was a longhair, etc.)

In 1969—with the Milan massacre, the Mafia, the emissaries of the Greek colonels, the complicity of the government Ministers, the trama nera, the provocateurs—the longhairs were everywhere: while they were not yet the majority from the numerical point of view, they were dominant in terms of their ideological impact. Now the longhairs were no longer silent: they no longer delegated the totality of their communicative and expressive capacity to the system of signs of their hair. To the contrary, the physical presence of the longhairs was relegated, in a way, to a different function. They once again returned to the traditional use of verbal language. And I do not use the word, “verbal”, casually. In fact, I place special emphasis on it. They spoke so much between 1968 and 1970 that, for quite a while after that, they would no longer be able to speak at all: they devoted themselves to verbalism, and verbalism was the new ars retorica of the revolution (leftism, the verbal disorder of Marxism!).

Although the longhairs—re-immersed in their verbal storm—no longer addressed their agitated listeners in their former nonverbal way, I somehow summoned the power to sharpen my decoding skills and, amidst all the noise, I tried to focus on the unspoken discourse, evidently uninterrupted, of their hair that was always getting longer.

What did their long hair say now? It said: “Yes, it’s true, we are now speaking of Leftist themes; our meaning—while performing a purely secondary role in support of the meaning of our verbal messages—is a leftist meaning…. But…. But….”
The long-haired discourse stopped there: I had to finish it myself. With that “but” it evidently wanted to say two things:

1. “Our ineffability is revealed to be increasingly more irrational and pragmatic; the preeminence that we mutely attribute to action is of a subcultural character and therefore essentially Right-Wing”;
2. “We have also been adopted by the fascist provocateurs; they are mixing with the verbal revolutionaries (verbalism can lead to action, especially when it mythologizes it): and we constitute a perfect disguise, not only from the physical point of view—our disordered flowing and waving locks tend to make all faces look the same—but also from the cultural point of view: in effect, a Right-Wing subculture can quite easily be confounded with a Left-Wing subculture.”

In short, I understood that the language of long hair no longer expressed Leftist “themes”, but rather expressed something equivocal, something that was Right-Wing/Left-Wing, which created a situation that made the infiltration of provocateurs possible. About ten years ago, I thought, among us—the preceding generation—a provocateur was almost inconceivable (unless he was a magnificent actor): his subculture was different, even physically, from our culture. We would have known him by his eyes, his nose, his hair! We would have exposed him immediately and we would have immediately taught him the lesson that he deserved. Now this is no longer possible. No one in the world can distinguish a revolutionary from a provocateur by his physical appearance alone. Right and Left have merged physically.
And then came 1972.

In September of that year I was in the city of Isfahan, in the heart of Iran. An underdeveloped country, as the horrible expression goes, but also, to use an equally horrible expression, a country on the path of development [in pieno decollo—“taking off”].

Upon the Isfahan of ten years ago—one of the most beautiful cities in the world, maybe even the most beautiful—a new Isfahan has been built, modern and horribly ugly. On its streets, however, on their way home from work or just taking a walk, towards evening, you see the kind of young men you used to see in Italy about ten years ago: humble and dignified boys, with their smooth necks, their nice clean-shaven faces under their proud shocks of hair. And one evening I saw, walking down the main street of the city, among all those old-style, beautiful young men who were so radiant with an ancient human dignity, two monstrous beings: they were not exactly longhairs, but their hair was cut in the European style, long in the back, short in the front, drawn back and artificially slicked down around their head with two ugly shanks of hair pasted back over their ears.
What did their hair have to say? It said: “We do not belong to these starving masses, these miserable underdeveloped paupers, held back in the age of barbarism! We work at the bank, we are students, sons of rich people who work for the oil companies; we have been to Europe, we read books. We are bourgeoisie: and here is our long hair that testifies to our privileged international modernity!”
Their long hair therefore alludes to Right-Wing “themes”.

The cycle has come full circle. The subculture of power has absorbed the subculture of opposition and has made it its own: with diabolical skill it has patiently transformed it into a fashion that, if it cannot be called fascist in the classic sense of the word, is nonetheless really a phenomenon of the “extreme right”.

And so to my bitter conclusion. The disgusting masks that the young men put on their faces, making them look obscene like old whores from an absurd iconography, objectively recreate in their physiognomies only what they have themselves always condemned: reminiscent of the old faces of priests, judges, government officials, false anarchists, court jesters, pettifogging lawyers, Don Ferrantes, mercenaries, swindlers, self-righteous weirdos. The radical and indiscriminate condemnation that they pronounce against their parents—who constitute the evolving history and prior culture—by erecting an unbreachable wall against them, has ended up isolating them, preventing them from attaining a dialectical relation with their parents. Only by way of this dialectical relation—even if it is dramatic and extreme—can they attain to a real historical consciousness of themselves and advance beyond, or “supersede”, their parents. Instead, the isolation in which they have enclosed themselves—like a world apart, a ghetto reserved for young people—has severed them from their undeniable historical reality: and it has implied—inevitably—a regression. They have actually regressed from the position of their parents, resurrecting in their souls the terrors and conformities and, in their physical appearance, conventionalisms and miseries that once seemed to have been finally abolished forever.

Now the longhairs are repeating, in their inarticulate and obsessive language of non-verbal signs, in their underworld iconography, the “themes” of television or advertising, where is it currently impossible to find a young man without long hair: something that would today be scandalous for power.
It causes me sincere and immense displeasure to say this (in fact, true desperation): but now, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of the faces of Italian young men are looking more and more like the face of Merlin the Magician. The freedom to wear their hair as long as they like is no longer defensible, because it is no longer freedom. The time has come to say instead to our young men, that the way they wear their hair is horrible, because it is servile and vulgar. The time has come for them to wake up and free themselves of this guilty, anxious yearning to conform to the degrading order of the horde.

Here is one, for example. In the article that gave rise to this controversy (Corriere della Sera, June 10, 1974), I said that those who were really responsible for the Milan and Brescia bombings are the Italian government and the police: because if the government and the police had wanted to prevent them, these attacks would have never taken place at all. This is a commonplace. So, at this time, I will definitely get a few laughs by saying that we, too—progressives, anti-fascists, leftists—are responsible. In fact, in all these years we have done nothing:
because talk of “State-sponsored massacres” did not become a commonplace and everything stopped there;
(and more serious still) we have done nothing because the fascists do not exist. We have condemned them only to gratify our conscience with our indignation; and the more strident and petulant our indignation the more tranquil our conscience.

In reality we have behaved towards the fascists (I am speaking here only of the young ones) hastily and therefore ruthlessly, we wanted to believe that they were congenitally destined to be fascists and, faced with this predestination, there was nothing we could do. And let us not deceive ourselves: we all knew, deep down, that when one of these youths decided to become a fascist, it was purely by accident, it was nothing but a gesture, unmotivated and irrational; one word might have been all it would have taken for this not to happen. But none of us ever spoke with them or to them. We immediately accepted them as inevitable representatives of Evil. And maybe they were adolescents, eighteen-year-old boys, who knew nothing about anything, who plunged into this horrible adventure simply out of desperation.

But we were incapable of distinguishing them from the others (I am not saying that we could not distinguish them from the other extremists, but from everyone else). And this is our appalling justification.

Father Zosima (literature for literature’s sake!) was immediately able to distinguish, among the crowd of people in his monastery’s reception room, Dmitry Karamazov, the parricide. Then he rose from his chair and prostrated himself before him. And he did so (as the younger Karamazov later said) because Dmitry was destined to perform the most horrible act and to endure the most inhuman suffering.

Think (if you have the courage) of that boy or of those boys who planted the bombs at the public square in Brescia. Wouldn’t it be necessary to get up and prostrate oneself before them? But they were youths with long hair, or with Edwardian moustaches, they wore headbands or maybe a cap pulled down over their eyes, they were pale and presumptuous, they were obsessed with dressing fashionably, all alike, to have a Porsche or a Ferrari, or motorcycles so they can drive them like little idiot archangels with their ornamental girlfriends behind them, yes, but modern, in favour of divorce, of women’s liberation, and of development in general….

They were, in short, young people like all the rest: nothing distinguished them in any way. Even if we wanted to, we would not have been able to prostrate ourselves before them.

For the old fascism, even if only by its rhetorical degeneracy, stood out: while the new fascism—which is completely different—has no outstanding qualities at all: it is not rhetorical in a human way, it is pragmatic in the American style. Its goal is the brutally totalitarian reorganisation and homogenisation of the world.

A few weeks ago, when the Frieze Fair came to London town, Hollywood Superstar sat down (in the DM) with a radical and Instagram-powered neo-gallerist to talk about network painting and speedrunning shows with no nation. Here is the interview with Arden Asher-Tate, aka. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry.

Best group project since Reena Spaulings...it incidentally, or on purpose, has a overlap with the artists. Like Merlin Carpenter. They also don't priotise silly things like spelling, visual aesthetic cohesion, or neo-liberal graphics, much like the editorial over here in Hollywood.

Have you been asked to submit a project? If you haven't, maybe you need to be:

a) more underground

b) less commercially viable

c) worse at instagram

Access the project here.

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hello Percy Jackson's Mom. I am very glad you have liked exhibits. The project is anarcho nomadic space run by myself, sculptor Arden Asher-Taste.

After schooling I went to New York with very romantic idea of finding group of artists like Franco Polish Black Jean Porno Club.

I found painters who piss in corners and galleries in apartments, but you know these kids pay 3000 dollars now for an apartment? That was the case in New York. In Europe provision and scrappiness push against confines of bureaucratic rules but in Brooklyn my friends wanted art lifestyle outside capitalist careerism. I too wanted no rules but my Visa had run out and my money had run out. So now I am back in Berlin and there are painters who piss in corners here too.

HOLLYWOD SUPERSTAR:

What is there to be gained from nomadism in Today's World?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

hen you live nomadic you meet many artists and you become less of a tight ass because you need people to take you to bars and places to sleep. You take the train all over with university rail pass and never graduate and meet many artists and God forbid you see their artwork or you might puke. But you need these friends and they too are contours that help define your own taste.

HSR:

More than travelling between cities, which are all expensive and full of corners of piss- there is travelling through DMs. I have found you coming closer and closer as my friends excitedly report being asked to 'make solo show'. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry sail the seas of the social fabric to make decisions about programmes? How do you choose?*

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I follow back artists if I like their work and usually I ask them to make show. Two hundred artists have been asked to do exhibit, and I wait on images from one hundred more. But there are no tags and sales and no open bar. So the whole anarcho nomadic project space continues as decentralised accelerationist system driven by desire to make show.**

HSR:

It’s iPhone realness. And perhaps a way to solve the problem of recording performance/art. You speedrun the opening: it instantly becomes a memory on an iPhone. It is a collective camera roll. One of the reasons why I admire the practice because it is just so lean. What do you say to the idea that The fat that gets cut out to make your lean gallery practice are the people. That it’s a non human and semi anonymous non event. In this case, you are looking for some purity, no? No messy human ‘buzz’ involved?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I like very much the idea of a speed run. In the states there are massive conferences of streamers who run through video games as fast as possible. They find gaps in wall collision detectors and niche tech to skip cut scenes. Boys in bedrooms spend hours a day breaking the game and finding optimal routes to the endpoint. Reclusive artists like me can watch from my studio in Berlin, and live the route vicariously. I don’t romanticize efficiency programs, but I see value in breaking the game of exhibition and art career.

Now there is need to interrogate networking from the angle of social practice, and while the project cuts out the physical gathering, the event of the iPhone opening is intrinsically social, by means of distribution.

HSR:

One thing that brings your shows together is the printing out of things, the use of printer paper. Do you see any other patterns in what people present to pirates?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Yes. With printing there is cheapness and informality, but also a rich history of expediency. In the same way this space rethinks need for context and infrastructure, many of these artists are challenging material value structures, focusing instead on communicating. Screaming nonsense is also communication. That is the speaking of growing babies.**

HSR:

Do you want to 'break art career' of 'big' artists for a moment? Or is it more important for these 'small' artists to be together?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hito’s show was very good. Over a 10 minute rant the performer linked together Georgia Alliata’s POCBI selfie exhibit, Guzzler, bad Jake Shore work, and her own theoretical oeuvre. These social games of in-jokes, forgery, and trolling are the same strategies the Real Fine Arts artists were playing with Network Painting in the early 2010’s (I use Network Painting from Jana Euler, in how she uses for self/scene-referentiality in her work. Later it was used by Zach Feuer gallery in NYC for the show Context Message, curated by Real Fine Arts.) We are interested in not big or small, but a familial conversation. Everyone points up to their big sister and makes mocking face. That is a part of family love.

Issywoodification...a true generational turn towards the blurring of form, ala greenberg, for 2025. Where artists once tried to reduce form, achieve flatness, break down representation, they now aim for the affect of a camera rubbed with vaseline. While an analysis of causation will be undertaken elsewhere, in the meantime, our recently de-twinked Timothée Shamalet identifies the lack-luster impressions of such formal choices.

The best painting in the National Gallery is obviously George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket. A horse raised on hind legs, trunk shining by some dazzling light, against an entirely beige void – a perfection of realism in an expanse of absurd, estranging nothing. Conceptual iconography in 1762. It’s a shame Stubbs is remembered as a mere ‘equine painter’, but maybe that’s also kind of the point.

I was thinking of jackets, and maybe also horses, at Magic Bullet, Issy Wood’s survey exhibition currently on view at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavilion. Mainly while looking at My neck / my scapula (2025), an A3-ish oil on velvet work of a puffer jacket, structured but wearerless, framed like a classical bust. In the work, and in the room, there’s a notional toplight, but the reflections behave inconsistently. Instead of a shadow within the empty collar, Wood has painted thick lime green. The material is taught around the button poppers, our phantom model’s frame bulging the garment with their very legend. We are the hollow men indeed.

It’s just a coat, dickhead. But it’s a brilliant painting. Partly because the rest of the works here are mildly terrible. Wait, no. There’s also a pair of supersized dentures painted like the Elgin marbles, fine. Also, one work that looks like a flower - drooping low, creases accentuated like the tendons of a hand - stigmata shining like kitchen knives, but also the aliens from that film Arrival.

But back to the point: rooms upon rooms of unquestioning ugliness. D1NNER (2025) stages a kind of post-Carrollian tea party (‘Have always been fond of him’, noted Vladimir Nabokov in Strong Opinions. ‘One would like to have filmed his picnics’; if only Wood were so risky as to engage two of history’s great quasi-nonces) but for whom? Floral teapots, cups and dishes line up across an unattended, almost depthless frame – neither synecdochic nor particularly expressive, they evoke little that’s felt and reveal nothing. Crisis Is (2020) – continuing Wood’s distinctly Y2Kish fixation on twentieth-century cars – is part car-dealership-website-ad as AI-interpreted in the style of Philip Guston, part Lana Del Rey music video mood board. Paintings that just hope you’re thinking what they’re thinking. Wood’s recent portrait of Charli xcx for Vanity Fair postdates the exhibition, but in its ability to capture nothing that we don’t already know about the pop idol from pre-existing footage, it would have done well here.

Wood has a lot to answer for: her style – tight crops, photo-similar faces, kitsch Disneyfication, bathetic scenarios, darkened peripheries like early-Instagram vignette filters – has (to her credit) become ubiquitous in recent painting and image-making. In their homage to earlier image technologies – namely photographic film and notionally cinematic images – they reek of nostalgia. This is all Wood’s ‘hyper-modern visual language’ as per Schinkel’s intro text, a useful reminder of how anything that looks bad – in this case, paintings with the colour palate of Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles or the Ticket to Ride board game – can be reframed as a branding communication system. Schinkel Pavilion is in many ways the perfect site for this, a place benefitting from the sheer vibes of its late 60s German oldness, but with worse lighting.

[Intermission: If at this point you’re struggling with this piece, a reminder that many good painters are still out there – Hayv Kahraman, Nicole Eisenman, R. H. Quaytman, Justin Fitzpatrick, even Julie Mehretu!]

It’s also what career ArtForumer Barry Schwabsky calls ‘perverted realism’, with Wood as a figurehead for a cohort of ‘chromatically dark’ painters evincing a ‘pragmatic apprehension of the incalculable multiplicity of threats stemming from any number of apparently unrelated but equally unavoidable conditions’. Over in good old Londinium, you’ll find it everywhere: Lukasz Stoklosa’s recent show at Rose Easton, which seemed to think the gothic amounts mainly to a spooky mood; a second show at Soft Opening by Shannon Cartier Lucy who, like Chloe Wise, appears to think skin-shine makes a portrait interesting; don’t get me started on Joseph Yaeger’s deflowering of the new Modern Art space. Though, at least Yaeger’s actually look like old films.

Schwabsky cites Michaël Borremans as a forebear of this ‘perverted realism’. Ask yourself, though, would any of the cohort’s proponents be capable of anything like his Fire from the Sun (Four Figures) (2017)? Maybe that’s unfair, maybe they’re just young – or so I hear their gallerists call out from the back, seemingly unsatisfied with the volume of canvases they’re slinging. But nonetheless is it so bad to want it all to be more, well, actually perverted? Wood’s formal ‘perversions’ and autofictional arrangements obscure any real deviance or depravity up for grabs. Instead, we have bunny rabbits painted onto the backs of guitars and muscle tissue depicted in a state neither of preservation nor violent exposure. The grid-pattern in Rough Facetime Study(2025), a bang-for-your-buck technique shared by a contemporary like Louise Giovanelli, makes a briefly perplexing puzzle of the work’s subjects: some bracelet pendants and a porcelain cattle figurine. Are these really the dark recesses of the mind, the memory, or the lived experience they resemble? If Wood & Co’s works are facing the present world’s ‘incalculable multiplicity of threats’, then why are they so flat, so quiet, so fugitive? It’s certainly insufficient to be content with such bland nihilism; art should reach into the dark, not just gawp at it. Reminder: John Berger said that all art reflects its times (what a downgrade today’s public art intellectuals are.

Maybe it’d be better if Wood only did coats. Maybe a whole exhibition of one would work a treat; maybe even a whole career, like Peter Dreher for the Vinted era. (Much the same could be said of Giovanelli and satin shirts.) If Stubbs is the greatest of all horse painters, then Issy Wood will, with any luck, be remembered as champion of puffer jackets.

"Hedi Slimane And The Death Of Documentarian Photography" or "Let's Ban Magazines From Using Scene As An Adverb" is an essay written by our resident photographic commentator, Distrow Kidd, on the infamous photo series released by THE FACE. It purportedly captured "fresh faces" who "brought energy to the scene". Granted, the pics were cool, but why does George Rouy have to be there?

Hedi Slimane’s photography has always consisted of two elements: documentary and fashion/editorial. In an era where a large portion of the fashion image world is informed by famous documentary photography from the 1980s-early 2000s (Nan Goldin for Gucci, Simon Wheatley for Corteiz, Nick Waplington for Self Portrait and Diesel, and so on) fashion can cannibalise the documentarian style. Mainstream fashion like Jaded London, Dazed Editorials, or whatever “MINGA” London is, lusts after the documentary photography's 'I was there' swag to commemorate and translate real events.

Slimane usually spends months with his subjects, producing documentary coverage of tabloid-ready libertine-adjacent musical artists from the 1990s and early-mid 2000s. This lifestyle inevitably bled into his design for Dior and YSL. For “New London”, a Slimane shoot for The Face conducted in August, his signature noirish morosity has been revived by a cast of relatively diverse and interesting faces from London’s artistic, musical (or tbh, party) scene: “Singer” Matt Molotov, and Lux and Wolf Gillespie, who are, to quote attendees “Nepo-baby founders of event where baggy jeans aren’t allowed”.

On a related note: in an incredible feat for a photographer, Slimane has progressed recently to photographing several bands that don't even exist (with some notable exceptions). Here are the strained faces of boys holding guitars in a way that will make you say: "He don't got one song where he needs to be doing all this".

Fakemink graces The Face’s cover with the sexiest (and most high definition) image of him to date. The underground rapper who blew to insane levels of fame in less than a year embodies the evolution of the London Recession Rockstar.

For reasons too numerous to go into here, It-Boys are much rarer than It-Girls. When I look at Mink and his cigarette, I can’t help but feel like Hedi has picked him up where he dropped off the agéd Pete Doherty (2007). Instead of being hounded by paparazzi, London’s prodigal sexyboy saviour is readily stalked by all manner of Instagram creepers, ready to disseminate not the shocking behaviour headlines of the indie era, but lore from the DM.

In fact, after the most recent Death of Live Rock Music as We Previously Knew It, visual and auditory tropes of the genre have become appropriated to inform the cultural Frankenstein that is the ‘new gen music scene’. We went from heroin and acoustic guitars thrown out the windows of Camden flats to the rarest supreme jackets, multiple Instagram accounts (and creative aliases) and the re-popularisation of cocaine for a TikTok generation that mainstream media still label as “sober and sensible". There was not a single rap song in the Billboard top 40: a sign of a cultural victory for rap, which fully merged with pop in the 2010s and at the turn of the decade going underground. Wherever underground is.

In terms of ‘documenting’ the city, the tables of cultural capital have turned. I think all the time about something that maybe goes without saying: that young musicians don’t really need photographers to succeed. The photographer in this equation is not someone who brings new information and personalities to light- that responsibility has been internalised to the artists themselves. Authority is what is conferred, the alternative aesthetic aristocracy is affirmed.

The clouted are figures that have been built from a combination of, variously: inaccessible wealth, aesthetic dissolution and small luxury brand sponsorship. So when we factor in the knowledge that a fair few members of this scene are quite literally children of the previous generation of stars Hedi would’ve photographed, and largely follow suit after their parents' public image, things get meta-freudian.

What separates Hedi’s images now from then is a wave of apathy fuelled by the importance of image over history and acceleration over action. Now, there’s this idea that as long as we can keep up the hype, it might turn into to something solid.

A side note: the nepotism criticism can be applied internationally. London is still the most interesting major city in the world right now, despite, or perhaps because of having 'no cool bars or no cool clubs', according to one Ike Clateman. Artist and trend forecaster Sean Monahan's article on the New Lost Generation of Americans in Paris follows the money and misses out London, perhaps because despite pointing to the fact that mapping out the geography of what's hot kills it, he can't resist doing it: 'The people you wanted to avoid were at La Perle, not Clandestino. The people you wanted to run into were at La Palette, not Funny Bar... Gutter snipes lived in Pigalle, not Bushwick. All of this – it goes without saying – is not supposed to be said. By mapping what is cool, you murder it.' Something to bear in mind in the gloom is that the lack of good spots is what keeps the beauty and the mystery of London. It's the psycho-geography version of the Dark Forest theory of the internet.

Without having any cool bars in London, it becomes difficult for photographers like Slimane to gain access to interesting subjects on street level without them already being connected to his world in some way. Although these images are visually striking, it is difficult for this project to escape the massive shadow cast by his previous books and anthologies: London: Birth of a Cult(2005) or Rock Diary(2008), Portrait of Performer series (2007- ongoing). How is he supposed to access something that is not just a residual aftereffect of a world that is still climbing up to him?

Fakemink points out in his interview that “2025 is the age of…nostalgia”. And I think that sums things up pretty well. On the front page of the issue in clear and cutting text is written: “Love today before it ends”, but it seems that today has already ended. Isn’t that the point?

While thankfully less common than in Berlin, a city replete with smoothened, outsourced objects often mistakenly seen as the end of thoughtful conceptualism rather than as the product of a much lower common denominator—a Ringbahn-bound collective condition of smooth-brained apathetic “coolness”
conceptual art in New York can at times feel like a circle jerk for bisexual men whose flirtations with the same sex are limited to the moments of tantric, pseudointellectual foreplay they partake in at downtown openings.

At Maxwell Graham, a merely aesthetic or self-aggrandising relationship to conceptualism has always been out of the question. While some of the gallery’s roster admittedly does less for me than the work of, say, Hamishi Farah, Ser Serpas, Cameron Rowland, and Tiffany Sia, there is little of the juvenile “I only got into conceptual art through Joseph Beuys” sentiment one often intuits in small downtown galleries. In “Display,” Zoe Leonard’s new exhibition at Maxwell Graham, comprised of only six gelatin silver prints depicting armor housed in nondescript museum and institutional settings, thought—the foundation of good conceptual work—is refreshingly at the forefront.

Much like the cold, detached hubbub sustained by the aforementioned men who sour conceptualism’s current reputation, the objects pictured seem as if they should foreclose sensuality or eroticism altogether in the way they privilege the episteme. And they do. Ranging between 300 BC - 1600 in origins, each piece of armor, even with its voluptuous tassets and faulds, is obviously masculine, immediately neutralizing the knowledge of the erotic, an arguably feminine power that Audre Lorde famously described as being often “misnamed by men and used against women.” Repeat those same forms multiple times within the same sterile vitrines, compositions, or gallery walls without providing historical context, and that repetition amasses into something more monumental: critique.

This is what Leonard’s practice does best—looking, repeating, serialising, aggregating to the point that form, always bound to history, begins to speak for things that transcend history. In the case of “Display,” what first emerges from this continuity of forms spanning 2,000 years in origins is the tired persistence of patriarchal militancy and violence throughout the history of the West—a fact that can be condensed into everything from the objects themselves, such as the muscle cuirass of the Romans and Greeks or the plate armor of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the rationalizing containers, such as the ethnographic, imperial museum vitrine, that precipitate their initial formation and absolve the sins that lie in their wake.

Leonard may share convictions with the mechanised, lens-based approach of the Düsseldorf Becher School, but her work is ultimately more aligned with the libidinal sleight of hand wielded by fellow queer conceptualists emerging in the late 20th century, e.g. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Glenn Ligon, than any photography movement or school. Hence, the desire that still bursts out from “Display,” some of her most acerbically mundane work yet.

This rupture is concentrated in one photograph, Display IX (1994/2025), displayed on the wall directly behind the viewer as they descend the stairs to the main gallery dedicated entirely to photographs of garments used in war and feudal contexts. Having been initially confronted with images of statesque armour, frozen in mechanical movement, repeated, doubled, and pictured ever so slightly differently to the point that their historical idiosyncrasies are rendered moot, the act of turning around and seeing the broken ab-laden torso of a broken muscle cuirass depicted in Display IX (1994/2025) wrests the most powerful element from repetition’s grasp—difference. And with it, desire floods the scene, too.

This is hardly the same libidinal or auratic territory underlying Leonard’s 1992 text declaration on the occasion of Eileen Myles’ presidential bid that she wants a “dyke for president,” nor the critical erotics lingering in her early 1990s images of chastity belts, lifted skirts, anatomical models, and the Niagara Falls, or her late 90s images of urban trees breaking through the fences meant to enclose them. Indeed, the desire occasioned by the image of the broken muscle cuirass is more memetic and pornographic than it is erotic. After all, Display IX is still a picture of an object of war.

However, it is precisely because it resides in that unspeakable zone wherein war and desire commingle, that the image also tests the very bounds of acceptable desire, sex, and discursive practices—an equally abstract and material dynamic from which queerness emerges. Keeping with the photographer’s past work, this desire is not only theoretically gay, but empathetically so, in no small part because it immediately evokes the visual schema of Grindr, where one is most likely to stumble upon a naked, cropped, floating male torso today.

But surely one cannot outwardly express gay desire upon seeing the cuirass without entirely betraying Leonard’s searing critique? Leonard’s work somehow convinces me that both positions—the anti-war critic and the shamefully desiring subject—can be held at the same time, however delusionally. After all, the desire that breaks through this particular dusty vitrine is ruled neither by eros, nor agape, nor philia. It seeks release neither through sacrifice nor mutual destruction but instead mistakes the momentary mania of visual possession and pornographic arrest with the inexhaustible wells of the haptic and the erotic.

The cuirass, a form de-eroticised upon its moulded excision from the human body, already reached the artist broken and caged. She furthered this deadening process by capturing the fragment in black and white, transforming it into a fetishistic spoil of history in much the same way that ethnography, the progeny of empire pictured throughout “Display,” has historically relied on violent acts of photographic capture to fix culture as a fetish object as a means to keep it, study it, exploit it, be turned on by it, degrade it, and eventually dispose of it.

Like Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924-), Aby Warburg’s unfinished project tracking the recurrence of classical images, gestures, and motifs across the history of Western art, Zoe Leonard’s practice often directs our gazes to histories that lie anywhere but the past. In “Display,” she pushes this to discomfiting ends, probing the psychosexual undercurrents of masculinist projects like war and questioning the latent biopolitical violence in 21st-century digital cruising (See the NYPD’s recent usage of Sniffies as a means to track and arrest cruisers at Penn Station) and the torso-directed desires it inculcates in viewers such as myself at even the most inopportune, or dare I say inappropriate, moments. At Maxwell Graham, the conceptual photographer first presents us with this sharp, Warburgian account of antiquity’s violent, pornographic “afterlife.” Then, she shatters things over our heads.

While in London Marina Abramovic is placed in the gallery-as-rave, Tamara Trauermarsch find that in Milan they put Nan Goldin in an airplane hanger, like a can of Bud Light in a 2000s HBO show.

From the raw intimacy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981) and the celebratory portraits of trans identity in The Other Side (1992), to the haunting memories of Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004) and the childlike melancholy of Fire Leap (2010), each piece builds a fragmented autobiography of survival and loss. Later works such as Memory Lost (2019) and Sirens (2019) plunge into addiction and ecstasy, while her most recent You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024) and Stendhal Syndrome (2024) expand Goldin’s vision toward mythology, abstraction, and the eternal cycles of life and death.

That didn't end well.

What we certainly weren’t craving in Milan was yet another slideshow of Nan Goldin’s portfolio. This format applied to her work is now as tasteful as that piece of Brooklyn gum you've chewed for ten minutes. Please note that, in this case, that piece of gum has been passed from mouth to mouth for at least 20 years. Terrifying.

In the same way I ask myself what was I expecting by having sex with a man on the first date, I wonder about my expectations when, at the entrance of the exhibition, the staff asked me to cover my phone's camera with a branded sticker. Was I in seek of a feeling? Was I supposed to walk around feeling proud to have been there? I don’t identify as a third-grader grappling with his first bruises and sexual experiences.

At that point, I wished the stickers were 'egg shell', so that the core of the exhibition would have been seeing everyone walking around scrubbing their phones camera covers like a desperate with a scratch card.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a second date and neither the satisfaction of a single broken eggshell. Both cases, I got a waste of time.

Worried that the exhibition could have been too lukewarm, they designed a route where every series of photographs was enclosed in a huge felt tent. There were at least seven different ones, each in a different colour and with a different soundtrack. They all had one thing in common though: the heat was nearly deadly and only acceptable if the purpose was to host the naked and afraid in the dead of winter. Even though the most naked and afraid probably couldn't have stand the environment either, and I'm not talking about the temperature.

The show's subtitle should’ve been 'Nightmare tents rotation': who on earth feels the need on a weekday afternoon to be trapped in a tiny, dark, sweaty space with tons of art workers? For Christ.

And anyway, Nan’s crusade finding refuge inside Pirelli Hangar is like hosting a punk funeral inside the Vatican.

The irony burns brighter than the spotlights sweating on those felt walls. Watching rebellion get institutionalised never gets any less obscene.

They love to define this kind of exhibitions “dialogue”. Sure, if by dialogue they mean a pointless monologue echoing through a cathedral of good intentions where the staff whisper about activism as if it’s an artisanal cheese: rare, pungent, perfectly aged for the website’s palette. I wonder if the real performance were the enthusiasts cosplaying empathy, in the need to look radical while staying perfectly respectable like a banker in fishnets, or an terrorist with a press release.

And the crowd applauds, amazed that despite being the size of an airplane hanger: the exhibition was conveniently tote-bag sized.

Apart from that, the last stop of this hour of slaloming Berghain-esquely through alt kids and uncool adults was the only one worth it. And that's probably why I couldn't see anything from how crowded it was. Welcome to Panorama Bar.

For those unaware, the infamous Berlin’s club is the happy alternative: they'll make you cover the camera anyway but you get drugs and can fuck behind the corners.

Pick - A - Boo!

Pre-Party hosted by Hollywood Superstar, Chess Club and Gnossienne Gallery.

Photos by Nick Gogh and someone else

Ft.

No Bra (Live)
Floods in Atlanta (Live)
Born Weekend (Live)
LC (DJ)
Soli City (Live)
Enzo M (DJ)