Vintage at Galerie Tenko Presents, Tokyo, 15.05.25-29.05.25

In a hut tucked between Shibuya and Ebisu is a new gallery space which opened last month. Well - ‘new’ isn’t quite accurate - but - ‘hut’ is no exaggeration. Since 2022, Tenko Nakajima has been running Galerie Tenko Presents as a nomadic space. These intuitive and nichely curated shows have occurred in locations cleverly orientated for each artists work; these range from a love hotel in Kabukicho for a Louis Backhouse exhibit, or the Hysteric Glamour shop hosting the installations of Argentinian director Amalia Ulman. Now, Tenko has got the keys to her first permanent space. It’s a hut that used to be a bar, that, as Tenko recalls, she had visited as a teenager circa 2015 on electro-swing nights, which, “already, during its peak was considered a bad genre.”

The inaugural exhibit in the space Vintage features installation work by English artist Merlin Carpenter. Tenko describes how she shared a taxi with Carpenter in Busan last year, how they discussed his Marx and Trier drawings - Trier being Marx’s birthplace. Carpenter made these works during a residency in Beijing (perfect) - they struck Tenko as both relevant and vintage. Boom, she goes off about how Tokyo is actually the capital of vintage and preserving the past:

“Vintage stores are treated like museums here, each item is repaired, cleaned and so-curated. I love the thought of the buyers frequenting a suburban Goodwill or Humana once a year, filling up boxes with weathered reunion t-shirts and college jumpers and restoring them to Japanese standards. Then re-selling them at prices surpassing their original tags.”

My first impression of Galerie Tenko Presents caught me standing between a Denny’s and a Starbucks - no Galerie or art kids in sight. I called Greta, a close friend of Tenko’s and I, who had invited me to go with her to the vernissage of Vintage - I’d hopped into a cab straight after my 9-5. She put Tenko on the phone, who apologized and chuckled,

“Of course, I put it wrong in the IG bio - sorry!”. She passed me the right address and I rode another ten minutes in an uber that smelled like citrus Febreeze. The vernissage was supposed to be over in five minutes - but, of course, there was no rush among the group of bright young things mingling and smoking right outside.

Before I could even set foot inside, I was stopped by my dear friends, Yoma (big scar through right eye, even bigger heart) and Carlos (mysterious guy, youtube connoisseur) who took my heavy Longchamp X Jeremy Scott bag off me and handed me a beer. We chatted about everything but art while a cute girl kept on staring at us. I wanted to include her in the conversation, because I felt awkward for her - she seemed to just want to be part of something and so clearly was not. After, I realised she was actually there with Carlos, he introduced her to me, in front of her, as follows: “She’s a Louis Vuitton bag customizer and one time she was commissioned to paint a father kissing his kid on the lips, so she painted this image on the LV trunk, but then LV did not approve of this image and now because of this incident LV only offers selective pre designed customisation.” She nodded her head. I didn’t get her name.

I squeezed past the people, said 'hi' to Tenko who just come back from LA and recieved a quick debrief of all that happened, could have happened, but did not, on her trip. She was wearing a cute beige matching set and was serving beer behind the bar with her mom, Hanayo an acclaimed experimental artist. Finally, I find Greta, she is chatting to a guy called Alex (never met him before, celine vintage bag, skinny pants, is offended about me asking if he works an office job) about her new loaded Glock 19 tattoo on her thigh. It’s big and sore and dope. “It’s the first gun I shot.” she says. She had gotten it to cover a tattoo she’d grown tired of.

I escape the conversation by climbing up the wobbly wooden ladder to the top floor of the gallery (I shall not be able to wear any of my outrageous heels to the next show). The uppermost floor looks like an abandoned Japanese bedroom. Partly falling apart; quite charming. Carpenter has painted his black, thick-stroke faces not on canvases, but on the gallery’s walls. Sprawling, with no boundaries, over the wood and metal inserts. Open Territory. It will be interesting to see how it interacts with the work of following exhibitors, like the second intervention in the space, by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, **Hanshan Shide.

A selection of Carpenter’s 2006 pencil sketches on paper lean against the walls in glass frames. My favourite, Trier (Beijing) 2 (2006) depicts a group of Karl Marx busts. They all look mad. It makes me think of when Beijing gifted the city of Trier a statue of Marx for his 200th birth year anniversary in 2018, and Trier was reluctant to accept the offer. Now, the statue stands, a 4.4-metre bronze statue, just off the main street.

Merlin Carpenter glided past the crowd like a wizard, his long hair flashing white-grey-brown as he snapped photos of us with a tiny camera. Carpenter’s entire career hums with political tension. Grounded in Marxist materialism, his work tears through the illusion of artistic autonomy, laying bare the art world’s unavoidable entanglement with capitalism. He doesn’t soothe; he sabotages. One of my favourites? Communism Time for a Bath (2003), a repurposed BlackBerry Alpen cereal box.

I climbed back down. The vernissage was over. We all walked off together to find an izakaya big enough to hold us all. I was overwhelmed, and Greta was overwhelmed, so she suggested we should Irish exit. We did so. Then she changed her mind, “Wait, let’s say bye,” so there we went back and said bye. The weakest Irish exit ever. I lit a cigarette on my way home with my new Tenko Presents lighter. It has a quote on the back, which I’d forgotten. I just looked it up on Tenko’s webshop. It says: “I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this and I am not.” I don’t know who you are, Georgie, but thanks.

After Amy, Chess Club Hamburg 18.04. - 10.05. 2025

A few months ago I started turning my back on Contemporary Art. I had entered what I imagined to be a major phase in my early adult art/life in which I’d reject other people’s artworks and records of my own and affirm my recently acquired and self-proclaimed writer status through negation. It was dumb and after some weeks I realized that not looking at things worsened my eyesight, dropping from a Mild correction to a Moderate one.

Anyway, this text isn’t about me but After Amy, an exhibition of Jasia Rabiej and Ant Łakomsk’s works at chess club in Hamburg (18.04. – 10.05. 2025). I think there’s something great about experiencing prints/paintings/pictures (in this case I’m not sure how and if one should categorize them. 'Pictures' in the early 20th Century Gertrude Stein sense of the word seems to be the most fitting) that reveal more of their layers the more time you spend with them.

At first only formalist observations came to my mind and I couldn't tell if I liked the pictures or if I could even write about them. Though I wasn’t sure I found the work boring, something initially left me hanging on its surface. And then I met the girls. Jasia and Ant are definitely not just a surface but actually bright and funny women. Like, really clever and fun and a bit neurotic too. And that made me like the work more. When we went to have drinks on the rooftop terrace of the Radisson Blu —there aren’t many options to elevate yourself in Hamburg— they told us about J’s meme page that got taken down and Ant lectured us about the Polish Pope Jan Paweł II (RIP!).

I had conversations with Amanda, the Chess Club founder. Can one experience an artwork in its fullness if the artwork isn’t discussed or carried out with visitors, friends, and if one’s lucky, the artists themselves? I don’t think there is a way to know if you really liked something without talking or writing about it. Even when it strikes you like love at first sight, you still need to unfold what happened because it is so interesting to discuss what you love in an artwork. I guess it is difficult for me now not to see them in their art. You know when they say dog owners look like their dogs? Well, the girls definitely resemble their art.

Ant’s paintings are elongated and wear dark, washed oil colors clouded in a white veil like in Silke Otto Knapp’s work. They’re reserved and subdued at first, but not evasive. I think they know what they’re stating. When I look at them, especially Living Room and After Amanda (named after Amanda Weimer—or Amy?), I can’t help but think of 19th-century French painting. The undertones could belong to the German or Dutch traditions—maybe that’s the Polishness piercing through?—The light shrouding the silhouettes, even in the rock concert one— the rose garden setting and the bourgeois living room—I don’t know, something of the model placidness reminds me of Olympia. Maybe it is too easy to refer to French painting. Again I am not much of a critic and am not even a visual art enjoyer anymore. Jasia's work on the other hand, while also working within the realm of girlhood, depicts figures and objects tied to the register of lower-middle-class taste, even though the girls in Jasia’s pictures don’t even appear to have jobs. They’re lounging around carefree, they have time to watch Trisha Paytas videos, dabble in arts and crafts attend birthday parties, etc. We assume they are girls, not because of any clear anatomical detail but because of surrounding cultural cues — bright frosted cakes, glimmering bokeh and TV glow, souvenir snow globes, long hair, handbags, and other ephemera of soft domestic excess — all familiar signifiers in the staging of girlhood.

Amanda tells me that Jasia finds her pictorial material online when she doesn’t take her own photographs. She sources images for D&R and sometimes sends Ant a selection to portray. Jasia’s prints, without ever being too obvious or obnoxious, could pass as AI-generated — but if you look at them closely, you understand they aren’t. So instead of looking at something and asking yourself if it's real and then finding out that it’s AI, you do the opposite: you look at something that you think is AI, but it’s not. It’s real. And there’s even a layer of makeup on the surface. Notice how the artist’s mixing plate is a palette is a makeup palette.

At times I tell myself Jasia’s pictures look even more like paintings than Ant’s paintings. I’m not sure about Jasia’s small altar display sculptures though but that’s ok because I think Jasia wasn’t entirely sold on them either. They work as a nice complement to the rest of the show. They ornament and display ornaments, luring us in with a shop window logic, e.g. dried seahorses laying on Bobbi Brown lipstick cases, a set of keys, coins stacked next to a carved and stylized ‘One Love’ inscription. They work great as set design elements or aesthetic bait but maybe that’s the point. I loved the rest of the show so I don’t really care.

Virus Studios, 6-9 Timber St, London.

Virus, Virus, Virus…

5/5 stars (if you have over 20k on Instagram)
3/5 stars if you aren’t

The first Virus event I attended took place in the AV room inside W1 Curates. A sweatbox with digital screens for walls and a single air purifier in the corner screaming for its life. A few were partying inside and a queue was waiting patiently to get in; ketamine fiends who look as though they have just come from school, wannabe fashion heads and a few creatives all chomping at the bit to get a piece of the action. Overall, the vibes are up. But, the management is a letdown. The owners were “operating the doors” - a shallow excuse to profile those with the highest follower count or let in groups of 16-year-old girls with fake IDs. It's a muddled system where no one really knows who is in the smoking area, and who is queuing, but no one really gives a fuck as everyone is high on various research chemicals.

If you are currently a chronically online music head, in or around London, you have probably been to a Virus event (or attempted to get in). Brainchild of nepo-demon duo Oliver Ashley, son of billionaire sports direct owner Mike Ashley and Tom Burkitt, legendary HFT Ian Connor meat rider (probably the first time it has been consensual), it has come to dominate the UK music scene. Here is your definitive shitpost summarising "Virus":

While many think of it as a club night, it all stems from a studio near Old Street. Buried in the dark corridors of W1 Curates lies ‘Virus Studios’ an unofficial rebrand of the basement recording space which hosts each and every popular electronic and underground musician you could name. From Rainy Miller to Plaqueboymax - hell - even Felix Lee strumming himself off, this is the go to spot for creating music when you are in London. If you aren’t in the studios themselves, you might bump into Ecco2K eating a Chinese takeaway in the kitchen. The reason Virus works is because they exchange studio time for performances at their events, packing their lineups with all those who happen to be about at the time, keeping the budget below an eye-watering amount. The real strides are made in selling the extra studio time itself. The events are always guaranteed to lose money, especially since they offer them for free. This screams London. It seems there are a number of events disguising themselves under the mantra of giving back to the community while simultaneously trying to use their resources to dominate the nightlife scene, leaving grassroots venues and events struggling to catch up outlined in Phin Jenning's recent Guardian article.

Fast forward a few months from the first event and we are at Venue MOT. This time it is out of their hands for the security and infrastructure, a positive departure from the system at the first few events, however they still managed to fuck up the entry. Tom is on the doors again, giving out wristbands to those coming in, and supposedly checking who has RSVP’d, but spending more time trying to chat up girls in the queue. However, when inside, the music blurs all negative connotations, and the sets are back to back to back bangers. Highlights included Wraith9 and Lancer, who are mainly focused on for their production for other artists. Their live sets are always the pinnacle of Virus nights. This is where the true gems of Virus lie, the team behind the scenes making real artistry, not the vapid slop of names, with a secret set by Luka Sabbat and Filthy. (It honestly would be more entertaining to watch both of them toss off into their own mouths than hear Luka clang for the 5th time in a row).

I was gonna talk about one of the nights at Ormside here but lowkey I can’t be fucked…

It’s one big rinse. There is a lot of money going around, but you're just another number to them. They will revel in your escalating attempts to wow them (unless you are Ship Sket, who they rightfully worship, love that don). Realistically, it’s another attempt to buy up the UK music scene, disguised under the mantra of ‘giving back’ through the non-existent entry fee. This isn’t for your benefit. Why would they do this if there wasn’t a gain from the reach? This is nothing new, yet another blow to artists who don’t have the insane capital to throw at growing their following.

At the end of the day, none of this shit matters, we are all still going to turn up to the next one. We will probably contract some new strain of avian flu from the sickly children in the smoking area, so I’ll see you at the next one, and you will probs catch me leaving with a bottle of Belvedere vodka that I stole from behind the bar (again).

Much love,

Alan_Bumbaclart_Partridge

A Rrose By Any Other Name, Hans Goodrich

I appreciate the opportunity to see work by celebrity artists where that celebr(ity)ation is usually local, or confined to spaces such as Gray, Corbett vs. Dempsey, the museums, the Ren, etc. So - how the hell did this lineup get into a space that’s only held three shows? The duo are clearly connected — unsurprising, given the directors’ previous tenures at various spaces in Chicago and beyond, one of which was called Hans Gallery. Hans Goodrich is a name that, according to the show’s accompanying text, originates in an alias. In 1948, Hugh de Verteuil chose it for the name of his Trinidadian restaurant in the greater Chicago area "although none of his relatives were named Hans, nor carried the surname Goodrich".

This string of nomenclature functions as the lore for the gallery, and it creates an odd relationship to the thematic of the show itself: ‘the malleable nature of identity’. The lore is an anecdote within the text, and so these constructed and referential actions are not only bound by the limits of the show and what’s in it, but the gallery apparatus that puts it on. Is this actually an interesting gesture? I think so, but I don’t think you have to read too much into it as I have - if anything, it allows you to have an ‘aha’ moment of connecting the conceptual space bounded by the show to something more informal and exterior to it.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Pippa Garner’s inclusions are probably my favourites in the show - I feel like there is less setup in how the work meshes with theme, and even outside of any ‘does this piece fit in the show’ problematics Breyer’s Shoe Horn #9 (2016) is a hilariously alluring amalgam of mentally, physically and interpersonally preserved objects. If the show’s position is indeed ‘the malleable nature of identity’, the flipside of the viewer’s position is that of untangling it, being a sleuth. Cursory Google searches will give you some, but not all, answers. I find that this resulting subterfuge around gleaning the truth contained within each work is best when the trail runs cold, or at least gets muddy: Vern Blosum is forever a mystery, as per his wishes, and his painting A Rose (2016) is an identity matrix, with no way out, yet even the name can only function as a descriptor of the initial oeuvre: “vernal blossom”. Karen Kilimnik’s Kate Moss at the Beginning (1996) is a deadpan de/reconstruction of early Kate Moss footage, to make as many Kate Moss-es as there are interpellations of her character: it’s Re-materialised lore (it’s actually available to watch on this random youtube upload).

You could say that a symptom of this kind of thematically organised show is an attraction to answers over reflection, which I think holds true for A Rrose… but is not constraining. Even the more direct ‘constructions’ of identity - (Lynn Hershman Leeson’s video work and Larry Johnson’s instructive Untitled (How To Draw Chelsea Manning) (2023), for example - ) hold their own. Its big names with a reasonably high level of quality are installed in an unobtrusive, slightly predictable setup. Leaving with answers is leaving educated, knowing John Dogg is Richard Prince with/and/for Colin de Land, and knowing about J.T. LeRoy and Roberta Breitmore. We’re supposed to leave with something, right?`

The Old Grey Liver Test, Curated by Galerina at Arcadia Missa

There was no overarching theme in Old Grey Liver Test. A cursory glance at the artwork list, which reads titles like “Youth cult synthesis” or “Dead at 55” alongside the title's explicit reference to a rock-defining 70s show, The Old Grey Whistle Test, makes clear an intention to reach a sardonic middle ground between sincerity and outright irony.

Youth Cult Synthesis, or Dead at 55, 2024, is contained within a neon-orange wood frame. Paracetamol instruction leaflets are layered on top of each other, the text sutured together through a technique (welting) particular to pocket making. As the show text notes, this skill was learnt in Mckenzies days as a studio assistant for Vivienne Westwood - a fact that lends the artist’s late 90s works And I’m Not going to let you wear me like a Tie Pin (1998) and Who Can Out Ferry Ferry (1998) a punky gravitas. These earlier pieces combine tacky, collaged strips of leopard print, the words “Bryan Ferry” written in cursive and a brooding, B&W portrait of the 80s singer. The effect is a fantastically dated, fragmented image of what it is to be a metrosexual ballad singer. McKenzie’s work makes me wonder what it feels like to have one's youth fetishised as a romantic idyll, your memories translated into collective nostalgia, and to laugh about it. Which discarded memories from our time might be framed: a fidget spinner, an obsession with identity, an ironic starter-pack meme?

In Stuart McKenzie’s Left Right, Left Right (2024) the word “Alt” appears on a square of printer tape, hand cut from food packaging. Above, the words “Left, Right, Left, Right” appear printed, like military steps, from a label maker. This semi-serious commentary on our misguided, but ultimately regimented contemporary vision of “The Alternate” (alt-girl, alt-boy) contrasts with less political collages like E’s ruining My Life (2024) whose text reads “Mistaka” on one line and “E,E,E” on another, but is more obviously funny than Gender Critical (2024) which simply reads “He is He”. Sarcasm was inherent to the show - something that feels, now, far more refreshing than an outmoded sincerity.

Brad Kronz’s works are witty, but not about pop culture. In 80s, 70s, a diagrammatic pencil drawing of a shaded square labelled “70s” containing a lighter square labelled “80s”. The paper is framed by two thick, wooden blocks where Kronz has placed strips of paper at an obtuse angle - acting as a sort of theatrical curtain for the minimal drawing. It’s a commentary on performativity within timelines and art historical nomenclature that is felt but not overstated. 80s, 70s aesthetically pleases like a mid-century modern drinks cabinet, while commenting on something as nebulous and subjective as decades.

The curious part of Kronz's works is the presence of the figurative. For Independent Artist (2025) Kronz cuts out the internal corners of the frame, forming pockets of shadow that can’t be seen from a frontal view. Frame and drawing become subsumed into a singular artwork, contrasting the separation of the two in McKenzie’s pieces. Kronz’s soft, graphite lines depict, unnervingly, a cartoon fish with a woman's face. Faintly nïave, slightly perverse, resembling a pre-millennium illustrated children’s character or a Henry Darger prepubescent girl.

Old Grey Liver Test is the antithesis of what is leveraged in the more mainstream, highly publicised art world. A show in summer at The Approach made it clear the veracity with which people impose the past onto an indifferent contemporaneity, comparing a new graduate class with the YBA’s, albeit, “more friendly, supportive, inclusive, diverse and international”. Old Grey Liver Test is curated by Galerina, a nomadic gallery run by two twenty-something’s. I felt a strange relief at seeing a show that was not groundbreaking. It neededn't be; it was not trying to redefine, rehash, or rebut anything. The curation proposed a witty, slightly tongue-in-cheek conversation between friends about taste, material fetish and personal nostalgia, focusing on the artists’ careful attention to craftsmanship, wood-making and paper constructs, collage and sewing, word-play and framing.

Allie Anime ASMR Documentary (10 HOURS) is Now Showing as part of Hot Ticket to Public Cinema Programme

Like the covid era in which it was filmed, Allie Anime ASMR (10 HOURS) is haunted by a masturbatory subtext. The film, presented here in its 4-minute (short version) follows Allie, and how she came to practice drawing hentai. The space of Allie Anime is restrained and titillating. In this analgesic documentary we are invited into two locations: a deserted neighborhood park and to Allie’s apartment, which is stacked with a liberal arts college book collection and covered in unframed posters of glowing girls in purple swimsuits. The binaural 500 Hz Frequencies, the violently saturated green/purple/pinks and the sparse dialogue mix together like the video version of a big spoon of Cal-pol. In this cramped and hypnotic film, the editing takes centre stage in what the VideoExpert call- facetiously- ‘post-liminal cinema’.

The layers of glow filters, lens flares and cartoonish colour grading from self-proclaimed Video Experts Neal Wynne and Sabrina Greco, recalls Damon Packard’s Foxfur (2012)- incidentally, another film built around a sweet and mentally-unbalanced internet artist traipsing delusionally around California. ​​Unlike the blood-pressure-raising plots of Packard’s films, the narratives in VideoExpert films are sparse. Stock characters drift through a (2000s) Lynchian Meta-LA. Allie Anime- a video with just 220 views on YouTube, tucked away in a playlist titled "Sketches"- serves as an early experiment in developing an aesthetic that would culminate in their first feature, VideoExpert1, which premiered at VenueMOT in 2021.

Like Lynch, there is a skin-crawling uneasiness to Allie’s social world that feels like a parody of human connection. Iris-effect red circles pick out frames-within-frames with the hallucinatory objectivity of an outsider conspiracy documentary. The ugly overlays of anime girls that divide the film into sections ‘Documentary’ and ‘ASMR’; fragment the frame and call attention to the surface of the screen, holding off the pleasure of sinking into the smooth depth-illusion of what could-be-called Allie’s ‘Goon Cave’.

“Okay so everyone is playing Mario Kart on the switch and I drew Princess Peach and it came out kind of weird, but everyone said that looks good.” she says. We watch her make an ugly drawing and share it online; we watch her make an ugly loaf of bread and share it online. The film loops for 10 Hours, I once went to bed with it playing and woke up to her repeating: “everyone said that it looks good.”. Doomed to repeat herself; a victim of mass lifestyle influencing. An animated girl, making her art for others and maybe for her own ambient, alienated, sexual gratification.

Allie’s terrible art and terrible baking is a spoof of brightly-lit didactic lifestyle tutorial content. What Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky has called ‘The Process Genre’ (2024): easily digestible representations of labour that become an aesthetic salve for a society too complex for anyone to understand. The final shots of the film are incredibly mortal: she photographs her loaf in the dark.

Gisele Vienne @ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin

Outside, snow falls and you take off your gloves. There is: a tie-dyed hoodie, a turned back, a pair of hand-cast Mary Janes. To the left, a teen-sized marionette, her feet bound in plaster Fila Disruptors. Behind her, a neon Soundcloud scene is scattered with galaxy print, puppets and luminescent sweets. This is ‘L’Etang’ 2021-ongoing...

The main room holds 12 identical adolescents. Dolls in glass boxes: 2003-2021. They lie in glass caskets, ordered and equally distanced. From inside, there is a secondary view of L’Etang (2020). Here, Vienne’s ability to choreograph space stands out: she dictates the audience’s ability to perceive the artworks, not just compositionally, but via the title. A play insinuates noise and movement, yet I was struck by the profound silence and immobility of the dolls. Directly above the neatly lined glass coffins are identical wooden boxes, bloody and open, remnants of the show I Apologize 2004-2017. Scattered and smeared with gestural marks, tiny handprints: suggestions of action. I get the impression that this is where the dolls “come from”.

The other connotations of “Play” is the anthropomorphic: teen-sized dolls, girls playing with dolls, the gallery as a dollhouse and the sculpture as a set. A concern with the semiotics of the body is characteristic of Vienne's practice. Her decision to use adolescent figures relates to her vision of the body as battleground: “Pallid complexions, blank stares, frozen faces sometimes splattered with blood and tears…like clues to a culture of repressed violence that haunts our myths of innocent, purity, whiteness.” (Elsa Dorin ‘The Colour of Anguish’ 2021).

What do the dolls represent and what do they tell us about ourselves?

Vienne employs the doll's form as it allows for projected consciousness. The doll's ability to be projected upon enables them to be characterised: “They are also Snow White and Sleeping Beauty; they are the bosom blonde who runs screaming into the forest, believing she is escaping the serial killer” (The Colour of Anguish).

The form of the dolls remains the same, yet each is personified separately through styling. In her styling, Vienne references culturally built up languages, how style can denote personality through the idea that “It’s not only natural but cultural to perceive” (Interview with Gisèle Vienne and Anna Gritz). Vienne adds to the canon of dressing up frequented by artists like Laurie Simmons, Mathilde Ter Heijne and Cindy Sherman. Sherman’s photographic characterisation is a further influence, Vienne captures dolls and puppets as a cast in the photographic series 63 PORTRAITS 2003 - 2024. Here, the dolls are equal parts sad, dejected and self-conscious.

Vienne cites subculture as a crucial backdrop to her work. This is expressed sartorially through delicately articulated styling—a baby pink lace-trimmed top peaks out from beneath a Bambii jersey. Heavy metal merchandise is paired with a monster mask, adjacent to badly applied New Romantic makeup and sportswear.

As our present era emerges as a Victorian parody, it is natural that steampunk is everywhere. In this aesthetic world dolls, automatons and puppets convey anxieties surrounding developments in robotics. Philosopher Kathe Hicks Albrecht believes steampunk has turned from subculture to philosophy: “Many proponents of today’s steampunk aesthetic are part of the burgeoning do-it-yourself (DIY) subculture”. As our technological developments speed up, technocrats emerge, genocide and war rage, Gisèle Vienne’s dolls feel strangely poignant for their rebellion against “mass production…it is this group which interests most directly align with steampunk” (Kathe Hicks Albrecht ‘The Machine anxieties of Steampunk’ 2024)

As Open AI prepares to launch the humanoid robot Neo in 2025, Vienne’s ‘A Puppet Play’ takes on a more urgent meaning. Perhaps we can learn from Vienne ’s understanding of the power of articulation in stage setting, styling, movement direction, and craft, as well as the underlying sensibility of care in the perception of humans and the post-human form.

Rachel Fäth and Zazou Roddam at Brunette Coleman, London

American neoliberal doctrine has found an ultimate expression in the technopoly of contemporary America - Meta, Pfizer, Dogecoin, and the Department of Government Efficiency. This post-industrial, post-everything condition, now inseparable from a malaise in Western society, began to dominate some decades ago. Francis Irv’s show of work by artists Rachel Fäth (b. 1991, Berlin) and Zazou Roddam (b. 2000, London) (hosted by Brunette Coleman for Condo London) makes no direct reference to any of this; in fact, the show is sparse, minimal and oblique. It is, however, through the material decisions made by the artists that the works not only speak of capitalism, but embed themselves in it.

Fäth’s two sculptures sit directly on the gallery floor, whilst Roddam’s contributes a wall-based work, two framed polaroid photographs, and a small sculpture atop a plinth in the gallery’s side room. In Roddam’s Lot 2454/ Lot 5152 (2024–2025), crystal doorknobs affixed to their relevant painted wooden doors, or rather to the truncated sections of what were originally wooden doors, protrude from perfectly circular holes that have been cut into the front-facing surface of two plexiglass boxes. The boxes are mounted to the wall in a manner reminiscent of a Judd ‘Stack’, out of which the crystal handles jut into the viewer's space. Behind the plexiglass the slices of door form a pile which produces a whimsical effect, whilst acknowledging the weights and shapes of the wood, juxtaposed satisfyingly by the flawless edges and inset screws of the boxes. Both are transparent, but there are subtle differences between the crystal and the plexiglass - the crystal looks hard, old (vintage) and provides an evocative glimmer of late 20th-century affluence, whilst the plexiglass seems recently fabricated, an inert frame derived from minimalist or conceptual art modes. I imagine the former to belong to a category of other crystal glass objects that includes chandeliers and champagne flutes, and envisage the interiors of yachts, expensive real estate portfolios.

The work’s only pronounced colour derives from the coats of paint that the doors have retained from their original function as front doors of houses. I think of handshakes and the opening of a door. And then of a house as the site of the intimacies of daily life and of the intimate calamity of the mortgage crisis of 2008, who’s long shadow is still felt. Lot 2454/ Lot 5152 looks skeletal, like the vertebrae of a spine within a plexiglass body - a nimble metaphor for the methodology she deploys. Her materialist critique reveals the skeletal structure of significance both within the work she makes and with regards to the conditions of its display.

Some of the materials for Lot 2454/ Lot 5152 were acquired at public auction. This nod to the economics of the work is a neat gesture. It functions as an ironic appraisal of the luxury status of the art object as something that could itself end up in an auction lot. Roddam offers a critique of the status of the artwork as autonomous and gently reveals it instead to be historically and economically contingent and part of a context, in this case, the context of the market.

Fäth’s work shares this stringent attention to form. Her materials are selected and reclaimed; heavy, rugged and industrial steel. Sitting side-by-side on the gallery floor, Locker 5 (2024) and Locker 6 (2024) are forms determined by the size constraints of storage lockers, a materialisation of negative space in welded steel. Some of Fäth’s earlier work sourced its steel from a New York production plant (Francis Irv is an NYC gallery). Steel was a chief American industry before globalisation took those factories and jobs elsewhere. Within this glib generalisation are the experiences of countless individuals of grand economic manoeuvrings. To intuit these poetically, as textures, is to jump between the general and the personal. The scrap steel is not, significantly, in its raw form; it is post-industrial, after the fact. The surface of one work is rusted in places, indicating the chemical entropy that takes place when the metal is left to the elements. There is an association here with industrial decline, alluded to in the colloquialism ‘rust belt’.

Isabelle Frances McGuire’s Year Zero at The Renaissance Society, Chicago.

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.