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LD50 Gallery is to shut its doors next month, as a statement from the Shutdown LD50 Campaign assures via landlord communique. Free speech is dead, so much for the tolerant left. The cultural echo chamber of lefty marxist fascist chimeras have destroyed the tyranny of differential opinion, leaving only a scorched earth where irony can never grow unfettered.
One less opportunity for a dodgy businessman, whose colleagues are ex-mob and are tied to wind farm investments cause that’s normal, to use a London art gallery space funding deal for something not related to movement and taxation or cleansing fiscal value exchanges wink emoji. One less venture for a curator with strange right-wing views, as if they’re a threatened species. Threatened by the inherent violence of the left! On the flipside, this occurrence presents an intricate web of gifts to the anti-normie libertarian or the lumpen privileged critics failing to get their arses in the pants of Real Journalism™. When incontrovertible evidence appears that conflicts with a shilled-for belief, just ignore it. When answers fail to appear, purposefully obfuscate the whole situ. Freedom of speech is freedom from consequence, something like that. Prognosticate a future desolation if the contemporary narrative is slowly torn apart, one full of mea culpas and false flag irony operations. Ripped to pieces by the hypocritical commie mallards! Nick Land is the outsider poised to immolate all received wisdom of the sodden philosophies that circulate in western arts & culture. Do not suggest the white hetero cis male should stop gentrifying and proselytising so much. Do not even suggest art criticism circles give them an easy ride, it’s supposed to be that way!?!?! It’s basically discrimination to suggest they should be platformed less. At the first sign of resistance all they have is eachother on twitter and DC Miller (who can travel irl on own budget very handy).
An important caveat to note, or ignore if it inconveniently breaks prefab libertarian emasculated rage, the individuals affiliated with the ShutDownLD50 campaign did not actually force the gallery to close and were fully non-violent. The protest, despite some muddy criss-crossing with other periphery groups, was to raise awareness that the gallery had organised talks with white supremacist speakers to coincide with an exhibition of alt-right artworks, which were promoted amongst far-right online forums. Unless you’re in court with the “tone police” this isn’t a manifestation that can be queried, although not visiting the show or listening/seeing any element of the talks shouldn’t be a barrier to form a livid hot take smashed out faster than an art bro penis without numbing lube (or cogitated slowly a week later, like a haunting and mercurial tinder post-date whatsapp chat gone awry). SDLD50 did raise that awareness to the immense credit of everyone involved, enough that the Mayor of Hackney was even none too pleased to make a statement about what he was made aware of. The landlord of the space wasn’t exactly thrilled to find out either, as most people wouldn’t be if they read the timeline of the events. So Moss and Diego, net art crusties flirting with the alt-right, move on finding solace with the most tolerated racist in the art world (Nick Land duh) and non-ironic Anders Breivik fanboy (Brett Rogers). Only reliable is the online support of eggs or erratic ariel pink tribute band rejects on androids, the vinegar smug kind who drive poor Owen Jones off of social media. With the osmosis of online/offline that can get scary. Richard Dawkins eat your godless heart out. Make space for Dude’s Law.
The poor helpless landlord, brainwashed by the real nazis, the art school liberals, booting out the cultural proletariat into the cold harsh streets of east London. They might have to find another racket to buttress their NRx fanfic experiment, buddying up to the garbage post-human internet symbiote worms of 4chan who won’t force them to acknowledge, apologise or even accept criticism in a forum outside of the electronic /pol abyss . Or a Piers Morgan AI.
Rote sarcasm aside, this wasn’t some kangaroo court. Right wing sympathies lie nascent everywhere in the London art scene, with all the money laundering and the dealers/collectors often being tories, the same tories pulling out all subsidies to arts education, forcing universities to run themselves like businesses which in turn makes art students behave like the children of a misguided Deliverance-Tron crossover project, apolitical career obsessed thirst hunters or “useful idiots of the art world” to borrow Megan Nolan's terminology. To oppose these things is not some hypocritical entanglement with an inconvenient truth, leave that to the art critics fighting with the concept of research and investigation when an article demands something beyond describing things. Those noble defenders and articulators of free expression, at least after the adverts for luxury clothing, expensive perfume and Sothebys auctions. The potentially misguided notion of art being something progressive, intrinsically liberal at source is another undercooked thesis proposal on the shelf, but in short it should ideally be a cultural infrastructure that supports a diversity of voices/practices. Also inclusive of the bad ones (even simchowitz likes instagram art and clipart abstractionism and the new museum likes slime in a fishtank with an arduino doing something nearby) and not, y’know, promotion for white supremacy and spinning it like it’s just part of the art. If the line isn’t drawn at tory donor, surely it can be drawn at the hinterlands of neo-nazism?
To end on a clarification, the call to “shut down” was not some humourless screeching tyre skid to protect the cabbage patch of that dangerous liberal echo chamber, nor was it a purgatorial wail to the state for some benign intervention. It was to say: white supremacism should be made untenable everywhere. Even in those “safe space” art galleries and any precious right-wing memezoid “snowflake” (to borrow their own terminology) artist or curator whose careers, or whatever nightmarish life trajectory they’re on, get hurt in the process might want to check their privilege and keep to the pages of ArtReview where they can whinge about triggered liberals in farting, clapping safety, far away from the real diverse communities of actual people who might actually want to live without threats of social cleansing, ethereal or otherwise.
Following are links to organisations where you can get involved and/or support:
56a Infoshop
HG: How long have you been at the gallery?
LD: I started here in 2015. I’m the director. I’m also an architect.
GIF: Also potentially a kantian twitter bot shitposting an idiosyncratic mixture of right-wing enlightenment politics and a browser-based anime AARPG level of garbage.
HG: Who owns the gallery? We’ve heard other artists are involved in that side of things.
LD: It’s not relevant to this story. He’s just a regular landlord [not an artist].
GIF: Who has ever heard of a “regular” landlord?
HG: What’s happening with the gallery?
LD: Between the exhibitions we close. We were planning to have a new show in March but at the moment given the circumstances we are still closed. It’s not a political show – only one out of 12 has had this content. I will reset the website soon [to show the list of exhibitions].
GIF: True, only one political show did have this context but that is apparently separate from the opinion of the LD Director who thinks the muslim ban/donald trump are fine. Will they reset the website from the links to Brett Stevens right-wing blog? Will they reset the website from the doxing images of facebook/twitter posts of other artists being critical of LD50? Why does a white supremacy website keep defending their every action? The website right now is someone who is shit-stirring to the level of a very commited r/thedonald/ forum master, full of screenshots of the critical tweets/facebook posts of individuals strongly against the fascist imperative of the gallery.
HG: Do you understand why the exhibition and conference have angered people?
LD: Of course I understand. But people haven’t bothered to investigate about us until it all blew up. These shows have been available since the summer online and no one said anything. Then this blog post was published last week. The Peter Brimelow show is still available and it mainly discusses economics. These people haven’t even been to the gallery once.
GIF: This is an interesting brain fart of exasperation. She understands why people are upset, but takes umbrage in the delay of the outrage. You guys are too late for your anger to be validated! Also offers no explanation that Peter Brimelow is the president of the VDARE Foundation, a nonprofit that warns against the polluting of America by non-whites, Catholics, and Spanish-speaking immigrants. To quote the Guardian article: “a recording of Brimelow’s talk reveals that members of the audience who contributed to the discussion were predominately sympathetic to his views, agreeing with his statement about the need to remove the “corrupt treacherous elite” in government and one professing support for David Duke”. LD is chattin shit. Why there was such an interregnum between these talks etc. occurring is because of the veil of secrecy over the events and the protection of irony or something. The only advert we found for these talks was on the aforementioned white supremacy website.
HG: People are annoyed that these people have been given a platform to speak full stop, given their views.
LD: Who else am I going to ask to talk about it [the alt-right]? I’m not interested in their background – I’m interested in what they have to say about the topic.
GIF: Interesting. Ask the alt-right about themselves! Because that is surely the method wherein most philosophical clarity can be extracted. Background is also apparently not applicable. By that logic, HorribleGIF could be a bunch of rapists but it would still be fine for us to give talks about social media, or how to troll white artists (sure why not - snowflakes is an apt name because they do love cocaine). What 'these people’ are going to say about the topic is surely uncritical, unless the alt-right has become very nuanced lately and has lots of non-partisan sub-sects that aren’t predominantly white males? Don’t ask us though, we’re hysterical leftist censors not interested in open debate of hate speech.
HG: Hackney obviously has a rich multicultural history. People have grown up being abused, suffering racism. They don’t want to people with these views speaking here.
LD: I live in Hackney, I’m part of this community and I engage with it. I’m not English myself – I’m another immigrant. That’s why I live in Hackney, because I love how rich the different communities are. The talks didn’t promote racism. Nothing had anything racist in it. The speakers do talk in other places and platforms and what they speak about does seem to be racist or fascist. But as an art gallery we need to be able to open discourse.
GIF: Every gentrifier-apologist artist that lives in some culturally diverse area of a city always says they’re part of a community and engage with it. Buying cigarettes from a local corner shop or having a chat with a local homeless person doesn’t make you engaged with the community, idiot.
If you aren’t racist and love Hackney, why invite speakers who think most people walking around outside are subhuman? Oh it’s OK because they just talked about economics (even though that’s a lie). But they are racist/fascist in other places, but not here in Hackney so it’s OK. Great justification. It was promoted amongst fascist groups though. Don’t worry there is a mea culpa for that.
HG: What about the swastika that was painted on your gallery last week?
LD: I called the police and they are filing a report. I am frightened I might be attacked. The landlord cleaned it off. He was shocked to discover this had happened. He saw the show and didn’t think anything of it. A couple of weeks ago nobody found it outrageous. I had to stay outside my house for four days. My life is in danger from certain extreme factions on the left who are violent and like to jump to any farce going on. This is not a joke.
GIF: This is a problem that occurs within the left, often mis-represented. We get identities that fall within the “left” that include Tony Blair, George Galloway and Jeremy Corbyn to name three white dudes to be in the spirit of awful things. They don’t all operate the same and sometimes associated groups bulldoze into the direct action & protests of other groups. We guess this give succor to the whole “leftist nazi censors” bullshit the alt-right like to throw around, despite the fact nobody involved is any form of violent leftist, we ain’t the fuckin IRA buddies.
So it’s not great there was swastika graf, although if LD was so frightened why did she make it the logo of the gallery instagram account? If she was so frightened why did she try to continually dox the critical artists, and circulate a PDF of their names to that very supportive white supremacy website. Peculiar. So easy to change behavioural gears. Maybe the “regular landlord” didn’t understand the alt-right art because it was so weird and ironic. We don’t even understand this pepe kek bullshit, we didn’t grow up on 4chan and don’t find it particularly interesting beyond a revolting spectacle. It’s not a joke when these alt-right people mount online hate campaigns against people of colour though. When we say alt-right people, it’s all the people that were included in that fateful exhibition that nobody found outrageous a couple of weeks ago. Oops! Racism isn’t a joke, until it is, until it isn’t. LDs non-English ethnic origin is a diversion.
HG: How do you feel about the protest?
LD: They are welcome to protest, I don’t know what to think. People are allowed to protest but if you are going to protest try to think about what you are protesting against. Inform yourself. People don’t think for themselves. The first way to understand it is to engage with it. I have moved on from this, I’m not interested any more. The talks were seven months ago but I have to deal with it now because I have no choice.
GIF: People are protesting against the gallery platforming racists, obvs. Protesting against far-right propaganda being used as art might be what some people are saying the protest is about, but it’s actually about LD50 letting the fascists have a platform. People protest that kind of thing! But if it’s Nigel Farage it’s OK but if there is some art nearby it is sacred? People don’t think for themselves is quite a far-right thing to say. Wake up sheeple, right? Take the red pill, cucks! Alas they’ve moved on now! Many locals of Dalston might not be able to move on from the racism they face, from other people or the UK at large. We are sure the community of Hackney, the one so engaged with LD50 and the one LD50 loves, would actually understand nazi sympathisers if they just engaged with them. But LD50 are not interested anymore, soz. Too slow with catching up to our white supremacist talks! Forget about it bbz. LD50 gallery has an active habit of deleting comments and posts on social media, unsurprisngly, but you can’t delete people being pissed off about racists being invited into an art gallery, no matter the obtuse justification. Advocation of white supremacy, it cannot be tolerated under the heading of the 'exploration of ideas’.
It’s not usually our style to respond to artworld dramas in any medium longer than a few tweets. They’re never particular exciting beyond the unholy fascination akin to watching some rats fight over a headless cockroach on the floor of a Subway. Moreover, they’re usually confined to a pattern - think of a writer publishing some text on something which upsets people by association and then using his/her social media to promote that text, thusly charging the gravitational pull of indignation and buying space for a pop-up arena of combative discourse below. An example of this would be Art in America’s 2014 piece ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’ by Brian Droitcour, itself a wavering diet-summation of a genre that seemed to evolve out of increasing access to technological means of image making and also began to historicise itself simultaneously. Weird right!!? Predictably, arguments followed on social media with responses from implicated parties and sideliners, running the gamut of indignant whiny rebuttal to carefully oriented endorsement. There’s a lot of wiggle room for staking out narratives, personalising them, claiming them or discrediting others, in other words a divine gift to every editorial intern for glossy art magazines that are half full of adverts for luxurious things and half full of tiny texts about arts beginning and ending with the authors name. Qualitative judgement and criticism in the Greenbergian sense is even more obsolete, obsolete accelerated, block-chained and stacked. The modern critique exercise garners no adhesion to the contemporary artscape even as an arse-aching literary nostalgia throwback. Old platforms haven’t all died and new platforms are not always replacing them, but reflective mediations serve commonplace delight regardless of the impossibility to predict.
Brexit and Trump, among many other unkind reminders given up to cultural onlookers, prove that despite our illusions of a slogging but mobile transition towards rectifying centuries of inherent vices within civilisation, there are still a lot of racists around. Not all supporters of Trump might have been racist, but nevertheless they did support one. Not all supporters of Brexit might have been racist, but the rise of hate crime against foreigners post-referendum says enough. Life goes on, whatever post-rationalised narrative you believe is the causation of this crisis in the west and until we’re in a full-blown totalitarian regime we have choices to resist without putting our lives at stake. These resistances can be boycotts, mild political integration or volunteering, adding to body count at protests, whatever.
The slightly shit TV adaptation of The Man In High Castle, which roughly follows a similar format to the Phillip K. Dick source material, does one thing quite well. It shows how many people can adapt or exist quite easily to life under fascism. Obviously the people that do are within regime-defined parameters of acceptable, something that Trump/May and the ukip scum keep trying to define with immigrants (first them, then us all). Most of the denizens of the art scene will not cease to exist, despite the general idea that fascist government wasn’t great for most art/artists. Over half of us fit into those parameters already! Futurism had a pretty big old boner for violence! But we think, given the tragedies within industrialised memory and after the late 60s that art is predominantly a progressive, liberal thing. Okay it has structural problems with insane gender and race bias, but that’s work in progress. As a concept, art galleries or institutions are not seen as part of a mechanism of state-sanctioned harm. Something like that, right? It’s the artists we turn to in dark times to offer cultural reflection and symbology for resistance. Yeah m9, not really so much. Post-vetements overstyled white art males of the curatoriat continue to offer smug “everything is shit” commentary in which they can never be proved wrong. Declining to offer any meaningful critique of tories/republicans but always ready with a hatchet for liberals when they fail. Staying aloof, hand wringing and never forced to contemplate more than jokes about self-employed artist tax returns or some hot take post-potato. Other artists who proclaim radical actions and aesthetics go on to exhibit at art fairs, work with commercial galleries and operate easily within a cultural exchange network built on un-unionised work and cheap labour. An independent project space goes commercial, takes money for anyone, talks about feminism but hangs out with Anita Zabludowicz on her Venice Biennale yacht. Curator does interview and talks about the nature of rigorous critique, but freaks out when it is suggested that putting only their mates in an arts council funded exhibition might be something that is twatty. Pointing out hypocrisy and bad art practices become anti-art, hatin’, jealousy or some kind of trolling without good faith (what trolling with good faith is, please tell us on a postcard addressed to BBC FOUR, PO BOX 80085, Arsequake Kingdom). Artists are not only often creepily “libertarian” but, in the case of LD50 Gallery, sometimes outright mini-fascists.
At this juncture we finally arrive at the point of this longform rant. LD50, a small project space in dalston junction, had some exhibitions of questionable taste and arrangement in recent months. The alt-right exhibit it staged using scavenged parts of the aesthetic and philosophical matter online wasn’t immediately partisan on the surface. It could have been bad satire, it could have been one of those things many adult-child digital artists do where they incorporate the very thing they critique. Obviously the depraved chasm which 4chan and allotments of reddit are located in is morbidly fascinating, to someone who feels they’re on an important media archaeology tip even moreso. Despite the Hitler quotes coupled with anime motifs and other bizarre conflations of alt-right imagery, the show itself didn’t offer a concrete position. This is a commonplace exhibition model that allows “racy” subject matter to be presented with critical immunity, because the art moves to within a viewers praxis. More often this is used with cultural appropriation, where a white artist will extract reference points and framing devices from culture they do not belong to and situate the art itself on the intersection of their gaze, etc etc. So the art is about the white gaze on other culture, that way it removes itself from, at best, being accused of ignoring postcolonial theory or, at worst, just being mildly racist. Very meta though, and you can extract 2000 words from meta quite easily. With the benefit of hindsight plus a screenshot of a private fb conversation, it became obvious the curiosity with the alt-right wasn’t coolly detached in the LD50 show. Given the social media output of LD50 runs along moaning lines about the apolitical nature of net artists and glib rejoinders to political/social occurances, strangely they might have found the blazing political net art they were looking for… just the bad kind of politics. HEY, bad is a construct in art that is irrelevant after postmodernism and pop art, so who is to say it is bad? It’s just neo-reactionary. Sounds like the working title of a group of Final Fantasy rebels. These dodgy politics weren’t always so clear, even in that classic uncertain/ironic way, so it’s possible it was a slippery slope slodden down.
As said in the beginning of this longform rant, the social media microdramas of the art cottage industry aren’t very interesting in themselves beyond the sorry online appearances of calculated hostility and contrived artjoke acumen. But with artist Sophie Jung posting in a public way a ‘call-out’ to a curator of a gallery holding quite dodgy fascist views, the fallout is more interesting than the usual bruised/inflated egos or comment flame wars. The gallery itself has responded by “archiving” the post and all the comments on the main page, as doxing (a strategy of online shaming perfected by the alt-right) bait to sentient pepe memes and twitter eggs. It’s an obfuscatory and aloof reaction, one that shows particular acumen to online psychological skirmishing. Take away the veneer of irony and you see only a few slimy individuals toying with repugnant ideas that most good artists would give no merit, even as illusory discourse.
Is it right to call out someone by posting private convos? Well, check the gallery events and talks - they were pretty public (albeit small and within purposely obfuscating platforms) call outs to those neon genesis authoritarians. A lighter discourse than “is it ok to punch a nazi?” but no less annoying. Of course the answer is yes. Do you argue the inverse that the alt-right should be given platforms? Do you agree with the BBC giving airtime to UKIP but not the Green Party, who have existed for longer/have more members/more elected MPs/have actually run a fucking area of the country? Logic has associations, and while you can spin them away, we fucking see you. The alt-right would legislate for the structural, hidden bureaucratic violence against non-white/foreign people but it is not OK to punch them? They’d happily punch you. It can be so easy if it doesn’t affect you, or to think it wouldn’t, to think that exposing their bullshit is better. Hindenburg thought Hitler wouldn’t be as evil when he finally was given power, the tories seemed to think appeasing the UKIP types was the best way to keep themselves in power. Fuck m9, punch tories AND nazis if you can get away with it. Yeah, if you can back it up, calling people out on something as basic as nazi sympathies is OK. Why did it take so long to be called out on? The alt-right are super zeitgeisty right now and net art dorks are into that because it can be processed into smug “political” diatribe and gestural academica. Things within the art gallery mechanica are afforded un-anchored critical protection at least until the management are revealed to think the muslim ban is fine.
It’s creepy that artist who have exhibited there previously, such as the fantastic Joey Holder and John Russell, weren’t aware of the dodgy politics. Some probably were, such as the Brad Troemel replica dubiously created by AMC network Deanna Havas. Some, like confused net art bro who makes net art that is a bit fash Daniel Keller coyly sits on the fence, crashing a nice-guy routine who isn’t allowed to be sexist. Sad! Other obsessive high grade opinion-merchants like Daniel Rourke attempt to turn everything into irony, glib spectator drama etc. In our limited capacity of visiting LD50 a couple of times for exhibitions and being involved in an event unrelated to the programming, it never was apparent to us there was batshit mental “eugenics isn’t such a bad idea” mind thematic brewing. We have to get used to being surprised in 2016 and 17, though complicit white men wriggling to force jokes out of “paleoconservatism” or something has stopped being surprising since 2007.
So all in all, it’s weird that Lucia Diego and by extension her gallery LD50 are so hot on nazi sympathisers or validating bigots. It’s less weird that a number of friends and collaborators gained before this right turn are just enjoying the spectacle as another performative event. Writer and curator Morgan Quaintance has written about the apolitical nature of the post-internet artist flotilla, the retreat into speculative reality depletes the apparatus to draw ethical lines and instead propels the artist/writer/whatever to pursue “gaming” the system instead. The autumn programming should be a public shame in itself, but the convo screenshot blew away clouds of doubt by direct admittance. But many white women still voted for Trump despite the “grab ‘em by the pussy” recording. Such is the dark art of spin. However, beyond LD50, this isn’t the first art gallery or curator with extreme ring wing views, no fucking shit. You’re aware the Zabludowicz Collection was built with arms dealing money, donates money to the tories and donates money to pro-israel lobby groups, right? To quote artist Patrick Goddard:
“Its been happening for some time and unfortunately artists and their work continue to be instrumentalized by ‘philanthropists’ with darker purposes and dirtier-than-usual money.
The Zabludowicz Collection is an artwashing operation designed to legitimate Israel’s systematic refusal of rights to Palestinians. (along with the BICOM lobbying group – also set up and funded by Zabludowicz money)
Zabludowicz’s strategy is part of a global shift to the right, and very much anticipates the US and UK state assault on arts funding, forcing culture increasingly to function as a vehicle of the right. Furthermore Poju Zabludowicz gives significant donations to the conservative party and a select few pro-Israeli Labour candidates. (Ruth Smeeth being a notable recipient of BICOM money – who kicked off the anti-Corbyn claims of anti-Semitism last year)”
The director of ZC doesn’t espouse any political opinion though, just a disturbingly banal desire to be press-shotted with artists and to fly around the world looking at arts. Their programming does not reflect the mechanism that the foundation operates, which apparently complicates the issue for artists enough that any mea culpa is fine. It looks like until some outright admission of fascist tendencies is made from the primary source, everything is up in the air conceptually. Another question is a worrying route into a sort of McCarthyism, where everyone who works with a place of dodgy politics is “besmirched” by association and the trend of the left attacking their own allies is further proof to right-wing nutcases like LD50 that post-internet art is trash. We can assume some people had suspicions of this gallery at the beginning, but no confirmation appeared in the absolute until the alt-right lovefest. Fair enough, net art people are often very weird anyway (which is fine!). Do you think the ZC doesn’t do similar things with Zionist interests, but without a programme of talks and some art to accompany it? Heather Phillipson, in a Nov 2016 interview with Adrian Searle says, and we quote ‘My next work will be furious. Fascism is on my doorstep’. Heather Phillipson has frequently worked with ZC beyond just exhibiting some work there. We really are at a loss to understand this kind of blindspot, how endemic it is among white artists in western cities. But without any provocation of fascist rhetoric it is unfair to start singling out artists and mudslinging - though we welcome all explanations as to how Heather Phillipson can be angry about fascism but be uncritical of an organisation that… ugh, just re-read what Patrick Goddard wrote. Research it, it’s not fucking secret. The mucus membrane between act and operation, is it that hard to see through? Is it really a massive, Trumpian stone wall? Would artists be ready to form a picket line outside LD50 if Richard Spencer was invited to speak? Even more neoliberal art apologists might refute that method of protest. Imagine the local community of Dalston Junction will hate artists in general even more if they notice white supremacist conferencing being held in a gallery. As if gentrification wasn’t enough! Do we all want to be associated with this kind of thing? Jake and Dinos Chapman are big fans of Nick Land and have shown work at LD50. The Chapmans are standard conservative reactionary britart hangover troll fossils. It’s embarrasing.The Guardian Newspaper employs a similar coterie of journalists that soften the dangerous ideologies of May/Trump et al. by zoning in and selectively extrapolating miniature nuggets of “leftism” (such as Trump’s opposition to TTIP) all the while crowing “he’s a monster he’s a monster but….” and looking at their political games with the detachment of an old cunt with a southwest london mansion who enjoys playing chess on their Gateway 2000 PC, their only brush with anything “liberal” being time spent in a minor theatre company during youth.
If you’re an artist doing some part-time teaching at art schools, tell your students about this! Make sure they don’t enter into the post BA/MA world as apolitical vessels thirsty for a myth-made-real version of ideologically dubious expression, based on a default assumption that artists are sympathetic to labour. If you don’t teach, perhaps consider it a good way to pay for those easyJet flights to European museums or Rat Basel Miami, unless you are too busy arguing about how Adam Curtis is the anti-christ while Theresa May closes our borders to the refugees of wars our state was implicit in funding or operating in. Understand that complications arise when the main financial sponsor of Frieze Art Fair is also the bank of choice for the Trump family. Maybe you avoid the Deutschebank events if you’re exhibiting there, because wouldn’t that compromise your ideology? If you’re in a union, make sure you vote for a union director who isn’t pro-trident. Write to your MP, don’t just screenshot your ‘delete my uber’ account dissertation. It’s OK to criticise your peers, hold them to account for some kind of progressive standard of ethics but piling hate onto an old lefty is not productive when you’re both just trying to unpick capitalist lineage to better understand power and it’s movements. JJ Charlesworth, a writer of ArtReview is a essentially a lobbyist for Tory interests, negging on cultural boycotts or protests against hate-speech! Evidence is in his dodgy slightly-closed-closet-door bigot attitudes, I’m sure lots of people have screenshots of a trans bashing comment or something that betrays a concience. But he might review your shows, has a family, so let him have his tory views in peace, right and don’t forget the afterparty invite. Manick Govinda, an Ayn Rand lovin’ brexiter working in an artists development studio?? What the fuck do you think will happen down the line? Because when they face criticism they complain that their comments receive criticism as a result of the “left” being the “real” threat to “free speech” it should worry you, despite the trenchant desire within your loins to be knighted by their credible notice, or whatever pressure boost your economy-of-prestige fueled trajectory needs for the sake of yr neuroses.
Now LD50 is out of the bag as too right-wing for the art world to swallow without criticism, but people still will fight over how it is bad to post private convos and publicly ‘out’ people even if a few months before they had a fucking anti-semite skyping in. And that will still be spun with tailored words.
Because a lot of us in the London art scene are white and generally not on the breadline of poverty we’re kind of unaffected by LD50s fascism, there is a reluctance to stake out a vocal position because we’re taught to court ambiguity as successful methodology, or something like that. The non-position position, the entrepreneurial cloak, logic mazes eating themselves as the apex form to attitude. The gallery have since changed their trading name to TIVERSE LTD but their prognosis can’t be long-term survival, unless their instagram weirdness really galvanises the turncoats and creeps or finds some very rich David Ike fanboy to invest. Ignoring bad smells is never a great idea, our whole biological purpose of smell to detect invisible malaise and thus act upon removing the harm it can do to our bodies. Not the most high-brow parallel, can we get a point across without retweeting our twitter bot making garbled Bifo and Deleuze references?
What is the fear that forces us to hold back on committing to our views… views that SHOULD by default be progressive, inclusive and reformative? It’s not fucking Serpico, it’s art, but the stakes aren’t wildly different.
Beyond art, a place in Dalston has offered those with academic fascist sympathies a place to organise. How is that anything but awful?
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VENICE REPORT we're outta here! the 'biennalepublic' wifi was just a sick joke that never connected and sucked your battery dry like a hungry river mosquito, while you enter the dumb sublime of gazing at buffering symbols and loading bars. The canapés were 80% cheese based. There was some art that people will talk about for months (oh I loved the ISIS pavilion!) and there was some tote bags that people will put inside an even larger tote bag until it becomes a bartering economy thanks to societal divisions bringing forth fallout 3. Apologies if the coverage involved less stupid jokes and pictures of dogs-as-art-critics. we hope you enjoyed it anyway and honestly, don't feel bad if you don't get to go. Unless you really like eating free lumps of cheese.
VENICE REPORT We haven't yet read through the obligatory frieze/artreview splurges on the main venice show, but it's being praised for having some kind of social political content, right? in the giardini we saw a lot of info-analytical stuff that would work better as a seminar rather than detached crypto artwork for snoresville intellectuals to peer at inquisitively (just for show). the arsenale has the above gem, which in context is reduced to a token gesture of awareness. Being aware of it does fuck all though, people just feel a bit bad about going on to the zab yacht, but then they just think oh well, it's survival. I'll drink her booze and take her money, I'm so poor and precarious. What's even lamer is that UAE worker abuse is so detached from us in the grey-skied west, we'll never really care. It's too othered. Our hotel waiter seemed to be doing 16 hour non-stop shifts, but I guess he wasn't building an art museum so we can't take the judicious mantle because it's obviously totally beyond our remit of giving a fuck about things beyond object d'arts.
VENICE REPORT You know what the world needs, even more than economic stability from the widening chasm between rich and poor generated by neoliberal market capitalism? Another biennale! Sweden had a party to announce theirs in a swanky hotel, lit up ostentatiously like the city is just a dead relic for the playtime of global art & privilege business. The toilet queues immense, the canapés rich and cheesy, the obligatory "political performances" cringeworthy like a 40yr old yung lean singing at your wedding.
VENICE REPORT it's almost an obligation at this point to be the de-facto hypocritical grumpy dad and lament the near constant use of cameras, the visitors spending more time taking their photos than actually looking at the art. Maybe it's just a venice thing, but not many folks here have any fucking spatial awareness unless you are a mate, a glass of free wine/canapé or an instagrammable scene.
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VENICE REPORT the incongruity of things is markable, such as Spain's exhibition of Dali footage alongside this twat who obviously just discovered tumblr/thejogging or has listened to some post-Internet primer as a sleep audiobook.
sure everyone's heard of the mini golf pavilion and it would be grinchy af to criticise it because it's a laugh with some pretty weird courses, such as john akomfrah's which uses a very mournful cultural symbol in an obviously flippant set up. there are equally valid forking paths of interpretation, but something originally fun left us uneasy. also, our old scourge of the art scene is a platinum sponsor! now that's a clear case of lols.
VENICE REPORT a hot trend this year, aside from black suit trousers worn with black Nike lunarglides, is this architectural model presentation and harmonic wall images - might be related directly or obtusely. we've seen about 5 of these quasi-installations so far, not really sure how to feel about them because we like models and stuff that looks slick and utilitarian but it is also BOOOOOOORRRRRRING
VENICE REPORT Sometimes you walk into a room and think "what the fuck is this shit? what is it for?" and then when a dorky guy poses for a mega-art-selfie, you realise that a lot of this bollocks ott decorative art's only purpose is to behave as backdrop for Facebook profile picture or Instagram selfies. Which makes you think of a really good thesis: art activated by social media integration where agency collides with networked self beyond overbearing tactile situation. or another thesis: complete fucking arse.
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VENICE REPORT it's not all bollocks though, as our grrl hito has another eye melting brain fuck in the basement of the German pavilion. We love her work, as it combines some insane concepts with a political undertone(s) that is self-aware and pointed, couched in loads of cultural symbols that old nerds like us have fun recognising. the film is so barmy that it feels impossible to actually say anything bad about it - dunno if that is bias or some kind of critical blindsight. regardless it is a welcome change after looking at some fucking terrible bodily wood carvings lying on a marble floor.
VENICE REPORT a more mature version of the hyper-accelerated GCSE art therapy is an exhibition that purports to be about sustainability and the attitudes/aesthetics thereof, but is basically a series of rooms filled with daft electrically powered useless things. You might say that is part of the comment about sustainable lifestyle ideals, which cleverly insulates the work from having any errors. it's really just like a bondage version of that old windows 95 screensaver.
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