I liked the photographs of the sculptures more than the objects themselves. Each image brings the context of its time – it does matter when and where the art happened for Mendieta, perhaps more so than it looks. Her interest in the body and cultural ritual is not uncommon today, a strain of ecologically informed or sympathetic feminism sometimes dismissed as cheaply equating womanhood with nature. But where certain formal tendencies might seem familiar, feminism has changed since her time, as has popular understanding of nature and environmental consciousness; somehow this image has persisted.

The question of how to consider the politics of Mendieta’s life and work is, from my perspective, a useful way to contextualise and consider the significance of her artistic practice, what it meant to place the body – often her body – literally in nature. At Tate Modern, the visual and emotive register of the works differ from Mendieta’s early performances which are often cited to bolster her political and feminist instincts: in 1973, she lay naked tied to a table in her apartment, covered in blood and the room askew, to draw attention to the prevalence of sexual assault on her university campus. What is privileged in the exhibition is her Silueta Series, a series of photographed performances that placed her body in nature somewhat abstractly. Despite the controversy it would have evoked in its time, work like this is easily depoliticised now: abstract forms that reference nature and the body evoke broad, universalist notions. That we exist in the world, that knowledge can be sensual too, that there is something to learn from our embedded existence. Such ideas can be politicised, too, quite easily as the wider perspective should invoke a greater responsibility, should invite the conclusion that collective action is necessary, yet that does take additional care in how the material is introduced and displayed.

In the curation of the exhibition, little is said or shown that would contextualise Mendieta in her own time. Little is said, for instance, about Cuba, her relationship with the country, its revolution, the missile crisis it sparked during her life, or how the sense that art itself carried a social function and responsibility animated many of her peers. Perhaps this is not surprising – it is often avoided that she came from an aristocratic family, that she was related to the president installed by the dictator Batista and her father was arrested for taking part in the Bay of Pigs.

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She plucked up and placed into a new context at a young age, and soon experienced the tumultuous social context of the USA. Art historian Kaira M. Cabañas described Mendieta’s journey in 1999:

‘As the Mendieta family grew increasingly concerned over the future of their country, they decided to send their children to the United States under the auspices of Operation Peter Pan. On September 11, 1961, Ana, 12, and her sister Raquel, 15, arrived at Miami International Airport, but unlike many of the other children sent to the United States, the Mendieta sisters had no family there. After spending their first few weeks in refugee camps, they were sent to Dubuque, Iowa, where they moved from orphanage to foster home to orphanage.’

Cabañas continues:

‘In the Midwest, the girls experienced not only a new environment but a new sense of difference, compounded during their adolescence by the intense racial climate during the Civil Rights Movement. Although their skin was “white,” Ana and Raquel became targets of racism. During high school in the late 1960s, their classmates called Ana “nigger” and told her, “Go back to Cuba, you whore.” These experiences exacerbated their feelings of alienation and displacement, and, accordingly, both women later began identifying themselves as “non-white.

An art student in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Mendieta worked through a similar set of concerns as her peers, particularly around process, dematerialised art practices, questions about identity and the body. She began as a painter and did something difficult to describe in purely artistic terms – not a sculptor, a performer, or a photographer exactly. Her world was one of ritual, borrowing from the world of anthropology, yet thrusting these ideas into the present day, somewhere between sociology and a stunt. In the exhibition, occasional references to A.I.R. Gallery, a commission for ArtPark alongside David Hammons and others situate her as part of the late-20th century New York art scene. I found it illuminating, compelling, yet was often starved for some detail: a reference to a panel talk she participated in was simply described as discussing the relationship between art and politics. So what?

Furious at being betrayed, uncertain where it all went wrong, desperately biting back his constant waves of resentment, the meeting between Starmer and Burnham will proceed with a polite, understated exchange of clichés.

He, the current occupier of the office, will welcome the heir apparent. The air will be tense, awkward.

“Listen, about everything...,” Burnham will begin, planning to say that none of it was personal. “... It’s best we continue,” Starmer intervenes, attempting to explain that he was resigning out of a sense of duty, actually to help Burnham, to give him time to prepare. “... For the good of the country...”

“... For the good of the country,” Burnham echoes, interpreting that as their mutually agreed understanding for why Starmer was pushed in the first place.

What Starmer hopes to achieve from the meeting is to guide Burnham, in the way he felt failed in the early days, to truly grapple with the scale of the challenge ahead, the impossibility of getting enough people to agree to make things happen, not just MPs and the unions but the civil servants, the arms length bodies; to make the maths simply fucking work. He presents a slim a4 envelope, about half of the size it was this morning, with a set of legislative priorities that Starmer believes really have legs. A promising PPI scheme. An internal memo about where the unions will likely settle. But at least 4 pages about Ukraine.

“Ukraine...”, he says, flipping the a4 around on the table to face Burnham..

Burnham, dreading that Starmer in a desperate last minute plea might pitch himself as foreign minister, earnestly reaches forward for the folder to regain momentum of the conversation. “This is great Keir, genuinely.”

Starmer can sense that he means it. Burnham can sense the emotion in the air, needs to land the moment: “We... My team will take a look.”

He holds open the first page, scans it slowly, adding “Really good.” He clasps it, attempting to assuage Starmer, before setting it aside.

This is encouraging, maybe the transition will be smoother than I thought, Starmer thinks, feeling some weight lift from his shoulders. Actually, it’s been a while since he’s felt that. Relief.

“But listen,” Burnham says, pivoting as smoothly as he can, “I wanted to say that my heart really went out to you and Victoria. That attack. On your home. It’s really unbelievable that’s part of politics today.”

He was surprised, but touched. “It’s the risks to your family,” Starmer replies, “that are the toughest parts of the job.”

“Absolutely.”

“But the response from the security services was top notch, gave us a lot of confidence.” A slight creak of vulnerability enters his voice.

“Good, good.”

Starmer regains his composure: “What makes it worth it, ultimately...”

“Yes...”

“... is the sense of duty. That the highest office demands.”

Burnham nods. Pauses, almost repeating for the good of the country, but he’s not sure if that’s too much. “We owe you our thanks, Keir.”

Starmer shifts in his seat, the final compliment had an uncertain after taste. He worries his initial doubts were correct all along. They’ve already moved beyond the envelope.

Shifting his phone out of his pocket, with a slight shuffle to reach his hand into his tight jean pocket, Burnham pulls it not in front of his face, but just on the edge of the table.

“I need to take this. But let’s stay in touch. Ukraine…”

Starmer nods, seeing Burnham’s earnest grin look straight through him.

Two civil servants arrive at the door. The meeting is over, ahead of schedule.

Unrelated (sort of): I watched the film No Other Choice, and it’s very good.

I’ve paid little attention to Catholicism, not a surprising detail for an Irish person of my generation. The Church was largely fading from public life as I came of age, mostly in people’s minds due to the revelations of massive sexual abuse and cover-up, and their stubborn refusal to apologise and pay legally mandated reparations.

A book by Colm Tóibín, The Sign of the Cross, a sort of essayistic travelogue where he embarks on a series of trips through Catholic Europe, was my most significant re-acquaintance with Catholicism in adult life. The book charts, in a certain way, a familiar story: that the fingerprint of Catholicism persists, and while its explicit presence may be failing and faltering, the idea that it has disappeared from the minds, attitudes and habits of its former adherents is often wildly overstated.

We could also say Catholicism was and is an articulation of something deeply human, which is sometimes attributed to patterns of guilt and desire, a fondness for ritual, appreciation for the power of symbolism; that might not cut it, but you can see what I’m getting at.

More recently, I found myself reading Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, the second encyclical of his papacy, a robust outlining of the Church’s position in relation to AI. I was more surprised to find myself reading and interested in this document than the fact he had written it; of course an institution that had outlasted the Roman Empire and survived the Industrial Revolution could offer a perspective on the present moment.

As a form of writing, Papal Encyclicae are fascinating documents. Akin to the form and format of political theory and academic thesis, the author must marshall the vast corpus that predates them, working to craft a singular argumentative logic that lends their conclusion authority. It is also intended to be read, shared and understood widely – a pre-internet means of sharing information, forming consensus.

But to truly grasp the nuances of the argument demands an understanding of its theological context: the implications of the Second Vatican Council, the political commitments of various Popes, Biblical stories and their agreed interpretation. Yet Leo’s tone is polite and positive, at times indulging in enthusiastic pleas. He lays down his arguments with a pastoral confidence. This document takes platitudes – the good, truth – sincerely, and in a way, that lends it an emotional weight that is compelling.

Some of the most stirring sections see Pope Leo quote Pope Francis liberally, whose encyclicals reflect some of the most adventurous political thinking that critiques the neoliberal turn:

Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it: “It must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired… have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.” [7] In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.

It’s rare to see such an expansive view in mainstream discourse: a recognition that politicians and governments are not the primary actors in a globalised world, but private companies and the super rich. He is also willing to extend the notion of the ‘universal destination of goods’ – a concept that puts the public good ahead of the absolute right of private property – towards the digital sphere, extending the authority of democratic governance towards: ‘patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.’

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There are numerous compelling echoes of Fukuyama’s End of History, such as:

After 1989, the collapse of communist regimes in Europe was followed by a predominantly economic globalization, which lacked an adequate political framework capable of sustaining dialogue and peace. An almost blind faith was placed in the ability of the markets to generate prosperity, democracy and stability. In reality, rather than automatically generating unity and peace, globalization has provoked fundamentalist, identity-based and nationalistic reactions.

Where Leo continues Francis’ politically forward perspective, his primary contributions relate to the Church’s contradictory line in relation to technology and science. Some of the founding contributions to modern science were also religious figures; go back far enough, and science and theology were understood as related disciplines, both oriented towards understanding the world. But the ways in which the machine undermines, or competes, with humanity is a major concern of religion more widely.

Magnifica Humanitas is a different kind of text about AI. With arguments about the ethics of AI, and a growing concern about the environmental cost of its related infrastructure, it is the religious more widely who can object to the erosion of an abstract notion of humanity, and it is the Catholic Church more specifically who can register that objection as part of a larger argument which is traced back to the industrial revolution.

The Catholic intervention is not simply a ‘moralisation of the machine’, the notion that technology should continue with a limited series of moral restrictions; Pope Leo makes repeated reference to citizenship and democracy, inequality and social justice, global peace, not too disimilar from a Christian Democrat programme. But some of what seemed to me most lively and distinctive was a re-assertion of core Christian conceptions of life: that humanity was created by God and there is something sacrilegious about the technological self (‘acceptance of human limitations as a natural and positive reality’); that to live on earth is to suffer, a fallen state, where promises of utopia pave the way for damnation.

***

The media cycle around Magnifica Humanitas happened around the same time as Tony Blair’s polemic against the leadership challenge within the Starmer government. There is an odd similarity between both texts. Some of the most astute readings of Blair’s essay saw it as a re-heated Blairism for the present moment, a sort of lame rehashing of his preoccupations from the late 90s that swaps out ‘globalisation’ for AI.

Blair articulates a deference to capitalism and technology, a similar sentiment that Pope Leo critiqued as idolatry of power and profit. Blair writes:

… the technology revolution led by developments in artificial intelligence, which will change everything. I mean everything. There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’. It will displace jobs, though creating new ones, but no one yet knows the full consequence. Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it. It will revolutionise the private sector and should in time revolutionise public services and government. Yet people in most countries, including Britain, have no idea what is about to hit them.

Where Leo advocated a subservience of the market to human values, Blair’s vision of the ‘Radical Centre’ is one in which politics radically reconfigures itself around the momentum of economic shifts and technological development, preparing for a future whose inevitability is taken for granted.

To read both texts together is illustrative and illuminating. So much of the discourse around the election and faltering of Starmer has been an attempt to articulate a new political programme in the wake of the neoliberal period, from the revanchist right to the various shades of the populist left. Blair is shameless about the legacy of Iraq – but his intervention is notable, and we miss a lot by dismissing it. His fundamental assertion is correct: Starmer’s problems will not be solved by a better comms strategy, and while figures such as Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham might rhetorically distance themselves from Blair, their political project will not overcome the problems of the UK. We need ideas that look beyond the fundamentals of the status quo, not just its style.

PS.

Another layer might be instructive to consider: I was a little horrified, to be frank, at how many media professionals, critics and commentators moaned about the length of each text (Leo’s clocked in at over 40,000 words; Blair’s, a modest 5,700), some even joking about putting them into AI to generate summaries. The coming revolution might destroy our attention spans and collapse the ecosystem by which we support, distribute and consume writing; until that happens, can we hold onto the premise we can read?

I’m famously a Turbine Hall hater for reasons that I don’t particularly have the time / energy to go into now. Basically, it’s rare that the artworks can ever meet the scale of the space without fairly shallow visual tricks. Tania Bruguera putting tear gas and riot police into a sprawling gallery was great – but mostly, the spectacle generated in that space has been boring, boring, boring.

That’s why the announcement that Tarek Atoui will open a new commission in October this year was so interesting to me. I’ve written about his work in the past, and found his sensitivity to sound, space and experience very compelling. Scaling that up will be a tough challenge.

I’ll be curious to hear how critics respond to and unpack his relationship with his primary subject matter, a point I raised in my piece:

Speaking with Atoui, he is at pains to stress that he is not an expert, despite working on At-Tāriq for such an extended period. He resolutely avoids the role of the ethnographer, adopting instead a humbler and more curious stance, like that of a travelling musician. His admiration for traditional rural music is his primary motivation for visiting the Amazigh people, with whom he has no identity-based affiliation. They even found his interest in everyday recordings of traditional songs played at weddings or during religious festivals a curiosity, but he is not naive about the ethics of an exchange either.

But I’m also interested in how his career path, which he compares to that of a traveling musician, also acts a motivating ethic for his artistic practice:

After graduating from an experimental music programme at the French National Conservatory in Reims, he quickly found employment delivering workshops, primarily to schoolchildren in Paris. Over the years, he travelled further afield, sharing the same ideas with Palestinian refugee camps in his home country. A little later, he went to Cairo, where these workshops eventually expanded into a more coherent, gallery-based project that culminated in a shift in his practice at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009 – though he never abandoned the pedagogical dimension of his work.

You can read the full article, originally published in April 2025 by Art Monthly, below:

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Tarek Atoui: At-Tāriq

At-Tāriq, 2025, which translates as ‘the night comer’ – a Middle Eastern phrase evoking the idea of someone seeking refuge – is latest work by Atoui, who worked on the piece for nearly four years, including a two-year exchange with musicians and artisans from the Moroccan Atlas region and other nearby areas. Building on his longstanding research concerns, Atoui speaks about the project as the first chapter of something that will continue to unfold for years to come. The form of the work is modest and inviting, containing four main distinct domestic vignettes that are stretched across a long gallery space. Hospitality and the notion of majlis, a traditional space of hospitality in Arab and North African homes, is the abiding theme and form of the show; across the gallery, a series of comfortable sofas, armrests and seating cushions are arranged around a thick, carpeted rug. Wires snake across the floor, connecting various objects placed on tables. The room is dark, illuminated by floor and ceiling lights that cast a warm, flickering glow – relaxing, almost candle-like. Speakers are embedded within domestic objects, their echoes diffused through fabric and wood. Sounds emerge from unexpected places, filling the space with layered, shifting tones.

At one moment, the sound of a man’s voice sings through the space – a resonant, unaccompanied melody. Behind it, the soft chime of strings and wind instruments hum in the background, somewhere between a lament and a love song. Drums pulse, voices chant. At another moment, a woman sings, others join in response. A drum thumps, thick and booming. Delicate metal structures, sometimes spinning at varying speeds, are fixed to objects, perhaps responding to the music. Other songs take on a different energy – more upbeat, lively.

Scattered throughout the space are lamps, baskets, low tables and circular footrests. The placement of furniture and objects gives the space a lived-in quality. As you walk from one hub of furniture to another, the central soundtrack is inflected with sonic details emanating from individual objects. One curious object is an analogue-style recording device, where beads roll inside the casing where a tape reel might once have been.

At-Tāriq is rooted in the rural music traditions of the Amazigh people and traces a complex history of exploitation and exchange, spanning Spain, North Africa and the Middle East, shaped by sub-Saharan trade and pilgrimage routes. Flows of people resulted in cultures spreading, entangling. Trade and military power wrestled for control of land, just as they do today. In this way, the art world becomes another kind of circuit for commerce and discourse. Much of Atoui’s career has traced similar slippages of genre and geography. After graduating from an experimental music programme at the French National Conservatory in Reims, he quickly found employment delivering workshops, primarily to schoolchildren in Paris. Over the years, he travelled further afield, sharing the same ideas with Palestinian refugee camps in his home country. A little later, he went to Cairo, where these workshops eventually expanded into a more coherent, gallery-based project that culminated in a shift in his practice at the Sharjah Biennial in 2009 – though he never abandoned the pedagogical dimension of his work.

Speaking with Atoui, he is at pains to stress that he is not an expert, despite working on At-Tāriq for such an extended period. He resolutely avoids the role of the ethnographer, adopting instead a humbler and more curious stance, like that of a travelling musician. His admiration for traditional rural music is his primary motivation for visiting the Amazigh people, with whom he has no identity-based affiliation. They even found his interest in everyday recordings of traditional songs played at weddings or during religious festivals a curiosity, but he is not naive about the ethics of an exchange either. While discussing the themes of cross-cultural flow, he references a region in Morocco that has been struck by a draught caused by the production of electricity that is sold to Spain – mirroring the flow of Amazigh music along similar historical pathways. Similarly, Europe illegally exports mountains of electrical waste to Africa, particularly Ghana. Such examples illustrate how the poetic metaphor takes on a sharper edge.

Other notions of exchange are layered through At-Tāriq. The musicians he met also worked day jobs as craftspeople, so it was natural for Atoui to commission the artisans to create objects and instruments for the show in exchange for the recordings. Hospitality is reciprocal – the host facilitates the guest, and the guest abides by certain codes of behaviour in the process. Visitors to At-Tāriq become guests as they venture through the space, walking from one chair to another, taking a minute to pause, to look and listen, and move on again. Each station offers slight variations of experience, creating a meditative rhythm of repetition and change. The sound in the exhibition takes many forms: raindrops against tin; the crackling of fire. Objects hum, all plugged in, yet it is all resolutely analogue, tactile and bodily. The sound is not overpowering, nor is it buried in the background. It is forward, present, sensory – an invitation to listen with the whole body.

Tarek Atoui’s At-Tāriq: A Journey into the Rural Museum Traditions of North Africa and the Arab World, is at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, to 18 May.

Chris Hayes is an Irish writer based in London.

Irene Peslikis, Lori Hiris, & Carol Giardina, at Irene’s loft in Westbeth artists’ housing, New York City, 1992. Photo: Jenny Brown.

We’ve fashioned our own mythology around Thanksgiving. In London, the customs of the ritual are mostly foreign to the rest of us, although a handful of Americans in attendance keep us grounded. The turkey is familiar through the traditional Christmas dinner, of course. A marshmallow topped casserole, less so.

Even though too many people get invited, the guest list is always tight. Unlike most other apartments in a city where the rent is too high, we have relatively ample living space and a table that can fit four comfortably; we squeeze at least eight on the night. Others crowd around a sofa and low-lying table, a disaster for eating dinner but somehow crowded and ad hoc in a way that’s charming for a party. Office chairs are wheeled in. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen and others arrive a little later, one or two might leave early, so seating functions in a way not too dissimilar than office hot desking.

See what I mean about too many people? Yet I am almost certain a few friendships have been bruised by a lack of an invite. We do our best: thinking about who will mix well, plucking individuals from different aspects of our lives. Despite the jovial atmosphere of the night, some aspect of party curation must be ruthless. I love the vegetarians in my life: everything cooked on Thanksgiving is dripping in butter and meat juices.

The secrets to getting invited are more logistical than you might imagine, yet it is a fragile and dangerous endeavour. One invitation is not a guarantee for future dinners – your RSVP must be prompt and rock solid, any indication that you don’t respect the solemnity of the occasion could threaten your place. A good system of belief, whether religion, politics or dinner parties, should reward its most fervent adherents – even cultivate a cultist attitude.

One ritual begets another. Midway through the meal, everyone is invited (not optional) to indulge in a cheesy public affirmation of what they are thankful for. No one is allowed to repeat what has been previously said, although it’s perfectly acceptable to find a loophole by choosing something more specific. Previous subjects have included the obvious (“the turkey we are about to eat”), the thematic (“friendship”) and the unexpected (“divorce”).

***

I was thinking about our own upcoming Thanksgiving again after stumbling upon the New York Times’ article on Joan Didion’s own. She regularly held her own dinner parties, inviting up to 75 guests. “It has always seemed like such an awful holiday,” a friend wrote her after one dinner, “but you made it something quite wonderful.”

The Times romanticised her dedication to the dinner party as a part of her lifelong study of American life: ‘the cool-eyed minimalist who savored hard truths and looked as if she subsisted on crudités and aperçus, embraced the great American feast day of food and sentiment. And she staged it the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs, with an almost military mustering of planning and ambition.’

Her schedules and menus shifted over the years. One letter read ‘turkey out’ at 6pm; another stated carving would begin at 8.15pm with dinner quickly following 15 minutes later. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she tracked the events in extensive detail, even noting the time people arrived. Much of this has come to light through a public display of her personal archive at the New York Public Library earlier this year, although it also lives on in memory through her famed guests who were in attendance: ‘literary circles (Philip Roth, Edna O’Brien), the New York media (Jimmy Breslin, Jann Wenner), Hollywood (Liam Neeson, Claire Bloom) and the intersection of all three (Nora Ephron)’, as Patrick Farrell writes.

Julie Golia, the curator who acquired the archive for New York Public Library, was reported as saying: “She took entertaining seriously and was almost militaristic with her recipes. She was precise about how each recipe should be delivered.”

***

Some parties I wanted to know more about were those held by Irene Peslikis, a New York-based artist and activist who is best known as the subject of Alice Neel’s painting, Marxist Girl.

The painting is a fascinating culmination of everything people are drawn to romanticise about that era. Peslikis was an outspoken participant in socialist feminist organising in New York, staging protests where women would recount their experiences of obtaining illegal abortions, storming public meetings that aimed to further restrict women’s rights, and creating illustrations that were used by fellow feminists elsewhere, including here in the UK.

She was the more radical edge of what would become a more mainstream, liberal feminism, and split from groups to pursue that agenda. Neel held a different position: she was an avowed communist, the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union, and for her class politics triumphed over other questions. But Neel’s belief in portraiture put her at odds with other communists who favoured a didactic impulse: better to paint striking workers than to reckon with the identity of a single individual and all the bourgeois trappings that invited.

So much of the story of 20th century art history is about parties. People mixed in cheap bars and spacious lofts, having fun when they didn’t have much money, cultivating a scene without intending to do so. Peslikis’ loft in the Westbeth artists’ housing complex was both an artist studio and hub for activism:

As an early member of New York Radical Women, she helped disrupt the 1968 Miss America pageant with a banner that read ‘Women’s Liberation’. Her 1969 text ‘Resistance to Consciousness’ detailed some of the common objections or obstacles to consciousness-raising. And she followed other socialists like Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis in founding Redstockings, becoming so heavily involved that her loft on East Broadway became an informal HQ for much of their organising. For Peslikis, the sense of purpose was strong: ‘I knew I was part of making history.’

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/behind-alice-neel-s-marxist-girl

Importantly, people were having fun:

The photographs (shown below) were shared by Kathie Sarachild after Peslikis’ death in 2002 in a letter to Peslikis’ mother. ‘I think of her as I always found her in her wonderful loft in Westbeth, a vibrant spirit, surrounded by her exciting canvases, large and small, her sparkling work that she managed to continue doing despite her afflictions.’ The photograph captured a sense of that lively time: ‘Irene’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Marxist Feminist” conveys some of the fun, and irreverent spirit of these times.’

When writing about her life, I could only find glimpses and half-remembered snippets like this. Perhaps that’s always the way. Some things are better magnified through memory.

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Portrait of the artist as a Marxist-Feminist, by Irene Peslikis.

***

Historiographies of the dinner party place too much of a burden on what makes the night tick. Famous people with their famous friends, posing nonchalantly in the full knowledge that history awaits. The worst thing I could imagine is someone intentionally trying to engineer such a scenario: inviting only the most successful people they know, and taking stylish polaroids that future fans might paw over. Sheer horror. Bleak careerism. I’m sure it happens all the time and I’m glad not to make it onto those lists.

Part of the problem is learning the wrong lesson. The level of detail and care from Didion’s pays tribute to the great excuse that a night like Thanksgiving affords us: to put extraordinary effort into the creation of a meal. It’s a common phenomenon that people rarely bother to cook well for themselves. A simple pasta might suffice when home alone. But to whip up a sauce, season and sear meat correctly, slowly roast a whole tray of vegetables… that’s a level of effort that’s worth sharing with someone you care about. It is not the same to eat in a restaurant, even if you’re feeling generous enough to pay for the meal. The point is to take on the labour for other people.

That being said, regardless of how many Thanksgiving and other dinner parties we’ve held, I always end up neglecting my guests. I am in the kitchen, busy. Greeting guests with a drink is outsourced to someone else, as is managing the choreography of introducing different social circles to each other (I never said I was a good host). Once for my birthday, I held a dinner party with a menu that was far too ambitious, and as I had recently taken a pasta-making class, I made pasta three different ways alongside other courses. At some point, around 11pm or midnight, while rolling freshly made pizza dough I was politely told to stop, down tools and actually spend time with everyone.

Golden Age is less a novel about an illicit romance than it is someone recounting a series of forced confessions about the romance. A meta-text of memories clouded by youthful desire and inexperience, the protagonist is a pretentious writer in a middle-of-nowhere rural town who uses elaborate metaphors to pad out his confession: sex is a koala wrapping its legs around a tree; a casual relationship is an epic friendship; hooking up is committing, committing from the front is missionary and from the rear is doggy. ‘Once I clarified everything, the leadership told me to use fewer euphemisms and to get to the point.’

Wang Xiaobo, the author, died about five years after the book was first published – first in Taiwan, then later mainland China. He based it on his own experiences of working as an educated youth in rural China, a programme by Mao to mobilise educated young people, moving them out of urban centres to go ‘up to the mountains and down to the countryside.’ (Although, it is notable that Xiaobo’s protagonist is an uneducated rural farmer, and not one of the more privileged youth who actually end up causing some trouble.)

The feat of what the programme achieved is simply extraordinary. Following a hard-fought civil war in a country struggling with deep poverty and inequality, education rates soared – the amount of primary schools increased by 50%, and enrolment doubled. How do you orchestrate something like that in a country so vast, and even in the 1950s? It's hard to imagine something like that happening today, despite improved communication technologies and a much larger educated workforce. The goal wasn’t simply to encourage education or ensure more even development, but to combat the growing social gap in the country – the ‘bourgeois thinking’ that would undermine the promise of the revolution itself. About 17 million young people were sent to rural areas; the current premier, Xi Jinping, also took part in a similar programme.

The protagonist of Golden Age, Wang Er, enjoys remarking on the literary promise of his confessions: ‘Everyone loved to read my confessions.’ Often, the plot of the novel is a straightforward rehearsal of either the confessions or events that surrounded them; the novel progresses through testimony and digression. Occasionally, he departs from script and staging, offering up mundane details that seem illicit due to their exclusion. A friend who works in publishing remarks to Er that his confessions are like ‘underground novels of the Victorian era.’

Er first connects with his lover, Chen Qingyang, over a question of language. She asks him if she’s ‘an old shoe’ – a euphemism for a promiscuous woman. He doesn’t know her and believes her claims to innocence, yet through an uncharacteristic leap of illogical thinking, he concludes she must be an old shoe: being an old shoe is a stereotype, not a factual claim, therefore if people call you an old shoe, you are one.

Throughout the book, he often reasons things out in this way, with the book presenting a series of bullet points, an odd addition to the novel form that is perfectly suited to this idiosyncratic character. Later on, as part of a public humiliation ritual, Qingyang is made to literally wear a pair of old shoes around her neck. The gesture doesn’t pacify the mob. What does bring the whole ordeal to an end is Qingyang’s written confession: she hands it in, and the official turns red, asking her to rework it, which she refuses. Both Er and Qingyang are both released.

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Like a lot of literature that emerged from twentieth-century socialism, Golden Age has been read reductively as a straightforward form of anti-communist literature. Little nuance is afforded to a subject that there is little curiosity about. The book’s increasing fanbase across China is also a part of the country’s story, and the shifting cultural attitudes within socialism, yet an ugly jingoism clouds how Western readers are presented Xiaobo’s work. The novel bemoans bureaucrats and local officials abusing their power, and they are often the linchpins driving the plot forward. But Golden Age is mostly about lust against an isolated, rural backdrop. It is also a story of how love bleeds into friendship and the ambiguity of intimacy, how sex is often an excuse for conversation. It is youth clashing against societal morals and taboo. It is a confused young man trying to love women when the rules of engagement are written and enforced by a patriarchal order that is also screwing him over.

It began as it usually does. In my early 30s, as my body slowed down and the rhythms of my life began to settle, I started going to the gym, and eventually began paying more attention to how I dressed.

In my teens, I was always suspicious of appearances – it seemed shallow, always felt out of place. I was not comfortable in my own body, so the idea of self-expression was an alien concept. Considering the music I listened to, it made sense to wear all black, if possible, I always understood it as a placeholder, a practical way to sidestep the necessities of fashion.

The process began as you might expect. After a slow-building mish mash of generally appropriate brands – Uniqlo, Weekday, maybe some COS – I made a Pinterest board to accumulate and study references, eventually filtering what I had found to achieve something closer to myself.

Male fashion, as is often noted by writers on the subject, is more about the navigation of subtle codes than the flashy statements of eye-catching decoration or garish colours. Think a well-made white T-shirt with some hint of structure. A pseudo-neutral palette anchored in either beige or navy. As I continued, something strange began to happen. Among the archive of understated and functional minimalist basics I was amassing, a recognisable figure kept appearing – appearing again and again in different yet familiar outfits. Pale skin. Wide shoulders. Clad in the uniform of a late-20s, early-30s East London resident. There was Paul Mescal.

Unlike his counterparts – say, the more queer-baiting, fashion-forward Timothée Chalamet – Paul was casual yet sophisticated. He’s the tidied-up version of 21st-century masculinity: muscular but sensitive, comfortable and clean-cut. This is not to suggest he is indistinct. But it’s worth noting that his two most notable fashion-related moments – the silver chain he wore in Normal People and the oft-discussed, shorter-than-average shorts – weren’t exactly his decisions. The necklace was mentioned by Rooney in the original book, and his original shorts that drew attention were just GAA shorts – one is a production note, the other cultural expression.

But he is not an unwitting participant. In a GQ vox pop, he articulated a rationale for how the ‘proportions’ of the shorts work with a longer shirt. This is a small example of a larger point: contemporary male fashion is less about sophisticated navigation of code than it is about an authentic one.

Perhaps taste is better left unspoken; fashion is something worn, lived, performed. The great anxiety underpinning a conscious, explicit engagement with appearance is not that it is dishonest, but that it is revealing. Laid bare, we are less original than we might assume. The desire to be accepted flattens the self in the face of a greater collective identity. In the end, we all become our parents.

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‘The very word “personality,” JC Flugel notes in The Psychology of Clothes, ‘implies a mask, itself an article of clothing.’ Scrolling through Pinterest becomes its own form of rapid-fire mask-wearing – one image and then another, mostly forgettable, until one, surprising even to myself, stands out and solicits attention. The self is something discovered and performed, then discarded for another that fits better.

I like how others look. On the street, a parade of people walk by: a man returning home from work, wearing an office-blue shirt bland enough for a corporate context, yet somehow empty enough to suggest he has more going on in the rest of his life; a woman out for a walk in the evening sun, casually dressed, perhaps popping outside after working from home all day – creating a necessary break between working and resting in the same space. Others are dressed badly, oddly, all of it is totally fantastic.

It can seem as if social codes come more easily, more naturally, to them, but I simply have no expectation beyond what they present – a cliché, an archetype, a weirdo, it all blurs into the patterns of life and sociality. Individuality happens amid the stew of collectivity; we are only ourselves by contrast and complement.

I lately – perhaps for the obvious reasons – have been thinking a lot about accounts of various Cardinals watching the movie Conclave ahead of their own experience of it. Apparently, the new Pope’s brother recommended he watch it, “so he knew how to behave.”

The fidelity of films is normally something interrogated by their subjects real-life antecedents – even becoming a silly format for YouTube content: “Convicted gangster reacts to opening scene of The Godfather.” It’s a curious suggestion that a fictionalised depiction might provide guidance for a high-pressure situation. But where else can we turn for instruction? Baudrillard once remarked his bemusement at car crash victims recounting their experience as being “just like a movie.”

Representation in film is often a euphemism for issues of gender, racial, and other injustices – telling untold stories; untold by whom? But this is a different question entirely: a vanishingly small number of people will ever live a life in a religious organisation. Fewer still will climb its ranks, ascending to the top, going behind the sealed doors of the Vatican. It’s political intrigue that predates the left-right paradigm: a nation-state led by a disparate group of men from around the world, divided by language, geography and doctrine. Conclave provides adherents, participants and casual observers a glimpse into an experience lived by very few.

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People are happy to have their story told. FBI investigators found that contemporary mafia members and wannabes adored The Sopranos, a show which itself mocked its characters’ love of The Godfather. In the show and in real-life wiretaps, the gangsters were heard quoting lines at length, savouring the recognition that their lives had drawn. The sense of being a character lends agency and meaning to a person’s life. Stories have an arc; they go somewhere – and when executed well, are worth watching, and by approximation, are worth living.

It would make sense for the opposite to be true: that living your life to a previously written script would be claustrophobic, the very opposite of being alive. Drama and intensity generate feeling.

Public acts of violence – to yourself, others or both – borrow from a similar lexicon. TV and film depictions of serial killers, mass shooters and others often show the malicious thrill perpetrators take from the seriousness of the attention they receive, from doctors attempting to profile their psychology or journalists trying to write up their story. They relish being the villain, just like in the movies.

In an episode of SVU, the criminal psychologist played by actor BD Wong recommends the officer “appeal to his narcissism” to elicit a confession. In another show, the name of which partially escapes my memory now, the investigator chides the suspect: “Your fifteen minutes of fame is over; you’ll rot in a cell for the rest of your life. No one will remember you.”

I found myself watching less and less news around the time Aaron Bushnell died, a 25-year-old US soldier who set himself on fire to protest the war in Gaza. He livestreamed his self-immolation on Twitch, shouting “Free Palestine.” My pangs of sympathy with Bushnell, and later Luigi Mangione, were uncomfortable, troubling. I couldn’t give over any more mental or emotional space to everything that was happening, and held increasingly less faith in what following current affairs actually achieved. Debates about what the acts of Bushnell and Mangione meant often centred on the idea of the copycat – that in giving their actions a narrative meaning, others would be compelled to follow. Narrative has its own gravitational pull.

In a recent review of Helen Garner’s collected diaries, Anne Enright recounts the story of an Australian poet who shot a politician point-blank, explaining they did it to set themselves apart “from all the other, you know, nobodies,”

Enright’s writing about Garner traces a familiar note of feminist historiography. Despite her subject’s literary successes, she’s eclipsed from an influential anthology that skews overwhelmingly male. Gender is not the only dynamic at play here, but class too. ‘Garner wrote Monkey Grip as a sacked single mother living on welfare, scraping together cash by writing magazine articles,’ Enright explains.

Being a nobody is the other side of being seen – perhaps what is at stake is self worth. Celebrities have often described the attention of the crowd as warm, like the embrace of another person, comforting. Identity is validated through others, especially those who are strangers – our loved ones might lie to us, or lie to themselves, because they love us. ‘I am crude, a beginner,’ Garner wrote in her diaries at the time of her exclusion. ‘People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford book.’

I was commissioned by artist Natasha Rees to write about her most recent exhibition, ‘Time travel as fantasy capsule for freedom from heavy weights’, which ran at Ridley Road Project Space, SET Woolwich.

It’s always a particular kind of process, writing about an artist in this way – not the more distanced relationship that comes with review writing, where I’m working with an editor and imagining an audience, trying not to be overly influenced by the artist’s own framing. This feels more like going ‘inside’ to a certain extent. In many ways, I prefer it: it’s closer to how I understood myself as a writer when I first began. A partisan of sorts – writing in support of and in dialogue with the artist, rather than pegged to a publication, and all the pressures and rituals that entails.

Natasha is also a writer in her own right, so in the lead-up to encountering the exhibition in full, I had material to read, and our conversations were invaluable, too. Through this, I had a sense of some of the ideas and reference points she was thinking through – opacity, encoded language, containment and leakage, speculative fiction, the aesthetics of negation.

Writing after the fact, in the wake of experiencing the show in its final form, I realise this essay attempts a similar kind of decoding that the works themselves are engaged in – tracing patterns, echoes and tensions as they emerge across material, title, form and mood.

Full text below. I hope you enjoy.

Chris

PS. Her CLASSWAROOM is a brilliant and under-recognised project. Check it out.

Installation detail: (from left) "Antechamber to the gunk zone////" 2025, black matt vinyl, gloss and matt decals, "Refuse and corpses signify life" 2025, charred wood, resin seal, architectural wire, steel fixtures.

A Whisper in the Dark: Natasha Rees

The introductory text for artist Natasha Rees’s exhibition ‘Time travel as fantasy capsule for freedom from heavy weights’, which ran from 13 February – 28 March at RRPS, SET Woolwich, riffs on an ancient invisible ink and more contemporary uses of ultraviolet light used to decode it. Invisible ink is a good starting point – not simply as a metaphor for what is seen and unseen, or perceptible just beneath the surface, but a visual catalyst of encoded messages, the desire, or need, to share them through oblique means.

Mostly sculptures and drawings, with installation elements such as black-out vinyl that eclipses any natural light or views of the surrounding area, the artworks are dense and evocative. Refuse and corpses signify life, 2025, is a series of long charred pieces of wood, sourced from previous exhibitions, studio furniture and shelving, that are ominously nestled in the corner and inter-connected with architectural wire. The windows of the space are blacked out with matt black vinyl, also an artwork and not just scene setting, titled Antechamber to the gunk zone (////), 2025, facilitating a contemplative atmosphere. The black vinyl on the windows feature gloss oval shape decal overlays containing a matt circle inside it, some kind of symbol or graphical representation – an eye? a spotlight? a pill?

Echoing through the show are repeated motifs and a wide-ranging subject matter that elaborate a veiled language. Allusive forms repeat throughout: four corresponding oval shapes appear on the spray-painted black floor, If you concentrate hard, you’ll see it, 2025, bear similarities to a series of drawings with black holes – including drains, pupils, and open mouths. The drawings are tenderly rendered in graphite and colour pencil: ( o Busted lips), 2025, shows a distinctly Beckettian open mouth and lips against a stark graphite background – bruised, yes, but perhaps singing. ( o Snake mouth) lunges towards us as if trying to escape from the frame. The others – ( o Asbestos drain), ( o Dilated pupil), ( o Broken glass) and ( o Sewage pipe) – are true to the subjects of their titles, and yet not without a sense of mystery, mostly showing the black void inside and around them. The images could be read in sequence like the storyboard for a film, perhaps a horror, and share themes that foreshadow violence and danger – the animal attacking, the damaged body, the broken objects.

Rees often uses a stark black palette – she talks about it as an aesthetic of negation, but also possibility – and this atmosphere creates a hint of danger, if not a subtle gesture towards fetish culture, or the extreme cinema of the ‘New French Extremity’. The point, perhaps, is how richly symbolic yet opaque the cultural connotations of black are; an operative metaphor for her practice. The ever-present hints at interpretation invite the viewer to translate what is happening. The exhibition is layered with meaning, as suggested by the richly evocative titles that read like poetry: previously mentioned works, such as Antechamber to the gunk zone (////), make reference to the speculative notion in Mereology, the philosophical study of part and whole relationships, to ‘gunk theory’ – which Rees refers to as, “…the zone as a space for infinite possibilities for resolve, but also of disaster…”.

A sense of disaster looms – but not fatalism. The title of the exhibition evokes not just the idea of escapism, but a desire for revolt and resistance. With the exhibition as a space loaded with a rich referential lexicon, the stripped back aesthetic hums with the narrative approach from figures that Rees cites as influences – filmmakers Michael Haneke and Gasper Noé, choreographer Michael Clark and musician Mark E. Smith – who each strip their work to its vital elements, inviting the audience to unpack and make sense of the complete narrative fragments on offer.

Like a whisper in the dark, Rees’s work doesn’t hand over its meanings easily, yet it neither withholds them. Her practice operates through suggestion, structure and affect – privileging rigour, collectivity, and the slow work of making things visible. Read and look carefully, and something begins to emerge: not a single message, but a kind of code, shaped by context, held in tension, and animated by the belief that meaning can be nurtured and teased out, like the solidarity found through quiet persistence.

Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997).

People online were talking about quality, which as a conversation invariably drifts toward complaints about repetition in the entertainment industry while also getting confused with related but distinct notions high art, gatekeepers, the canon. I nearly offered some kind of response to a well-known hack pundit, but held back – it's not worth it, obviously. Yet it's perhaps valuable to consider why it’s so easy to engage: a certain kind of pundit is not only prolific and timely, but states their thesis crudely enough to become quotable, inviting further responses. Careers are built this way.

Expertise, by contrast, is slow and laborious to acquire – and, crucially, is more demanding to consume. A lot of culture adopts this as both tone and style – Dwight Macdonald calls this midcult, aka the middlebrow – which offers the benefit of flattering its intended audience without burdening them. Lowbrow is more readily understood: slapstick comedy, crassness and so on. AI-generated slop might now be thrown into the same bucket, although that seems to miss many of the nuances at play.

Lately, I've been thinking about another adjacent category: low fidelity. I first encountered this term used in relation to culture by a kind of entertainment industry consultant. He was discussing cultural production and consumer choices as part of an argument that reframed quality not as something dictated by gatekeepers, but as a complex web of values that inform decision-making. If this sounds like an attempt to apply business logic to the inherently messy world of human cultural life, that's because it is. But stay with me.

It's illuminating to hear a capitalist mind grappling with the question of why a potential viewer would rather scroll through user-generated reels than engage with a high-budget television production they've already paid for via a streaming subscription. Here, quality – as defined by acting, writing, and production values – isn’t necessarily enough; or rather, those markers become devalued in relation to the others that social media introduces – relatability, novelty, speed – that redefine quality.

Low fidelity, typically describing a more basic or less detailed version, often intended as a test or sketch of an idea like a prototype, only appears briefly in his piece, misused as a synonym for low quality. Used in its appropriate context, low fidelity is an evocative sidestep of more familiar fixed categories of quality, less pejorative than descriptive. I’m not entirely sure why this stood out to me, but with time, it's gaining more traction for me.

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Think of a weekly personal essay artfully pegged to whatever is trending in the moment, a 800-or-so word missive that is evocative and easily digestible – the correct balance of emotion and topicality, relatable while being informative: a subgenre of infotainment. Or a TikToker responding to another video or an article, simply relaying their thoughts without prior reflection or a script of any kind. Perhaps a semi-figurative painting that’s pleasing to look at, but also supposedly about identity and darker legacies of history – but it’s mostly pleasant to look at.

My examples here suggest a polemical intent – you might already predict what will follow: capitalism, the internet, or the capitalists behind the internet have so degraded the public sphere that artists and audiences are exhausted, running on fumes, and can do little less than little things.

There is a joy, of course, of receiving a snippet of something at the right time. The delight of a small plate of food would hardly be improved by more – a feast is a very different kind of dinner. I sneer at these short essays; I also read them. I’d rather rely on a single ‘content creator’ to present me well-selected things, rather than have to wade through the digital abyss myself. The promise of low fidelity culture is not that much – the limited costs it imposes, whether that’s time, focus or actual cash, are its greatest feature.

A constant source of distraction and novelty, low fidelity is easy to access, and is therefore a regular feature of contemporary life. Macdonald described masscult as ‘bad in a new way’, while low fidelity by contrast is good enough, always. The older forms of quality were attractive examples of status, and still are: it’s not uncommon for people to disparage their own habits as ‘brainrot’, directly invoking the idea that what they consume is bad for them in a literal and metaphorical sense. People both do and don’t believe their brains are actually rotting.

It used to be more common to argue for high art as something which improves us as individuals. Attending a museum, reading a serious book, whatever activity it is, simply being in the presence of good things was a worthy activity, like exercise or eating vegetables. That attitude is understood as elitist and old fashioned, replaced by a more common sense that art and literature are part of a healthy cultural diet that can easily accommodate controlled screen time, and enough video games and TV to be, for lack of a better phrase, normal.

What has disappeared from common vernacular is the hierarchical sense of culture – that some forms of culture are better and in a straightforwardly didactic sense, good for us. Brainrot speaks to the other dimension of this: that low-effort distraction is bad for us, damages our cognitive and social abilities, and might be an overlooked force of a dangerous rightward shift.

***

Dwight Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult

https://tehne.com/assets/i/upload/event/macdonald-masscult-and-midcult.pdf

Doug Shapiro’s Quality is a Serious Problem

https://substack.com/home/post/p-155018445?source=queue

Piper after Kuspit

Illustration accompanying review of Real Life Magazine Anthology published in Modern Painters.

I’ve been thinking about the history of response letters. Adrian Piper’s famous rebuke to Donald Kuspit came to mind: not necessarily for form, subject or context, but rather as an example of how letter writing is its own distinct form of discourse.

There is more writing than ever about art, and it seems to only be growing (My lates piece On Prescriptiveness tackled certain tendancies around this). But the response letter is a rarer beast, although it can often be the most fruitful – outlining a clear distinction of perspective, laying bare the stakes of any particular time.

Through various research projects, I’ve often found the ‘letters to the editors’ section more insightful than the main content, and oddly overlooked as a reference point.

I wrote a short text about Piper’s open letter – a text that is weirder, more forceful and experimental than is often acknowledge – which I am sharing below.

An Open Letter to Donald Kuspit is a layered text. Donald Kuspit was originally commissioned to write the catalogue essay for a major retrospective of Adrian Piper at The Alternative Museum, a show which took place in 1987. Piper, dissatisfied with the text, ditched it, but Kuspit persisted by publishing it in Art Criticism, the journal he edited at the time.

This staggered publication schedule helps explain the elaborate form of Piper’s letter – the text is busy, fragmented and experimental in its own right, and could likely only have been published by an artist magazine such as Real Life. She presents snippets from the original draft, along with her feedback, and then an additional layer of feedback, contrasting the original commission with the edited version he published, as well as fresh analysis of the text and references to subsequent phone calls.

It’s an extraordinary moment in art history, exploring a classic dynamic between an artist and a critic; and a shift from Kuspit’s authoritative psychoanalytic analysis to Piper’s rigorous feminist rebuke.

The letter begins with context. She outlines her ‘astonishment’ at his decision to proceed with the text and, right from the outset, she brings a humour that is both hilarious and cutting. ‘As you know, I do not think it’s one of your better efforts.’ The issue is not that he was critical of her work — though such an approach is odd for a catalogue essay – but that he accepted none of her feedback and repeated several basic factual errors she had corrected.

The first error is a basic factual one. He confuses the timelines from her interviews with those in which she wrote about her own work. ‘I’m afraid you’re still not thinking clearly about this.’ The lack of attention to such details contrasts sharply with his focus on her supposed psychological state. Kuspit repeatedly analyses Piper’s inner motivations, her ‘tortured self-awareness,’ and ascribes an agenda to her work that contradicts her own writing on the subject. ‘This type of armchair psychology is beneath you,’ she writes.

She recounts a phone call they had when Kuspit first provided the draft. He asked her not to take anything personally and explained that, to maintain his ‘critical integrity,’ he had to get behind how ‘smart and articulate’ she was. The strategy Kuspit employs then, according to Piper, is to ascribe the motivations behind her writing and performance to mental illness, and to suggest both activities are driven by a kind of trauma-informed narcissism.

Piper flips the script and questions Kuspit’s motivations. When he writes, ‘Each of her performances reads like a case history. In each she appears as the representative female, her problem-filled life a microcosm of the female problematic, an exemplary symptom of a larger sickness unto female death,’ she responds forcefully: ‘Donald, I'm afraid this is really gothically bizarre.’

‘Donald, I'm afraid this is really gothically bizarre.’

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Later, when Kuspit suggests that Piper ‘cannot escape the labyrinth of her spoiled self’ and describes how she ‘tightens the noose of anxious ambiguity around her psychic neck,’ Piper describes this as a ‘distasteful and embarrassing display.’ She draws our attention to the gendered violence of his analysis: ‘Your decision to vent your strangulation fantasies about me in public displays ugly and buffoonish impulses. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

What’s at stake here is not simply how a particular artist’s work is discussed, but the grounds from which a critic might build their argument, and where they should take it. Piper suggests, too, that Kuspit’s desire to put her down seems rooted in an insecurity about his own position as a critic in the face of an artist who writes — as his concern about ‘critical integrity’ seems to suggest. Why should the artist’s own ‘thoughts about her work [be] experienced as a source of oppression and control, rather than of information and insight’?

Race doesn’t escape Kuspit’s projections on Piper. In a footnote for the version published in Art Criticism, he writes: ‘For me, the political aspects of Piper's art, admirable as they are... are secondary to, and grow out of, her self-interpretation, which includes the sociopolitical interpretation and demonstration of her blackness.’ Piper is confused. If demonstration might mean to exhibit or prove something, how — or perhaps more importantly, why — does she show or prove that she is black? She responds: ‘This is a novel idea.’

As the piece comes to a close, Piper ends by recounting their second phone call. Kuspit was angry about Piper’s claims regarding his motivations in her feedback, particularly the suggestions about his fear of women and intellectual insecurity. ‘I was surprised at your anger,’ she recounts, ‘since your essay does exactly the same to me.’ This moment of tension between them offers further insights — that Kuspit never sought meaningful feedback, only praise, and ironically regards his own writing as beyond critical discussion.

Gary Indiana, Paris, 1981. Photo: Jean-Jacques Schuhl.

Someone asked me recently why I was bored with art, and I said it was probably more of an issue with the art world. That’s a bit of an unsatisfying answer because everyone, whether they’re connected with it or not, likes taking a potshot at the art world.

I’ve been trying to unpack these thoughts a little, and I think it has to do with the strange dissonance between how things are framed and contextualised, and the enormous gap between how the work actually looks or is experienced.

Writing about art for magazines invariably involves pitching an exhibition review, interview or whatever based on a press release before anything is available to see. It’s not likely that the resulting work is dramatically different from what the artist has done previously, which is totally reasonable, but these are parallel practices that are rarely acknowledged because they take place behind the scenes of the publicity machine.

A recent-ish show sounded incredible. It’s been a while since I looked over the release, but from what I can recall, I remember it made stirring connections between the history of cinema, the surrounding architecture of the exhibition and a deep cut from the literature of sci-fi. I didn’t pitch a review at the time due to other commitments, but having done this long enough, I had a sense that it would get picked up by a lot of magazines. It did, and pretty much all the writing riffed on the layered references the artist had laid out, attempting the difficult task of summarising it in the 600 or so words of the review.

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I was honestly shocked by how flat and dull the show itself was, especially since everyone writing about it seemed swayed by what had been promised. There were a few bits described as an installation, but it’s more accurate to say there were some wall-based pieces and a singular piece of furniture. I’m not complaining about Conceptualism or formally reductive practices more generally, as I think this tendency is quite distinct, and I also want to make it clear that my charge is that there is a lack of thinking behind such projects – the excess is not found in rigour or research, but in what is being claimed. The art is not overburdened by the text, it is almost irrelevant to it. The real centre of gravity to the exhibition is the press release. Form follows nothing – it is an excuse for the proposal and publicity.

The gap between how art is encountered and distributed points to the overlap between individual artists and the institutions that they navigate, but also the economic and social structures that shape the context of their work. It is likely that the object may not even exist before its justification has been penned – the stranglehold of experience and meaning begins in the first stages that the artwork is created, which is the plethora of applications for grants, residencies and everything else that underpins its creation.

In the gap between the object and its message, it's often not particularly clear what is being said about the Big Topic – eg. climate crisis, colonialism – and the specifics of the work, so the argument in the writing hangs wearily between the macro and micro, never fully landing on the specificity of the artwork and its relationship to the research that underpins it. I’ve come to describe this as a crisis of prescriptiveness in art, which operates like an iron cage of meaning around the object and artist’s practice – there’s little space for any conversation or discovery when everything is so pinned down and constrained, let alone a moment to experience the work itself.

Joaquin Phoenix in The Master

Charlatans have a strange appeal. I get recommended a lot of videos from a particular business influencer. He’s not explicitly selling scams like dropshippers et al., but he offers advice – on topics I don’t care about – with an obviously empty level of confidence. Every potential challenge or doubt someone else faces is a jumping-off point for a simple three-point plan, or elucidates a counter-intuitive principle that he can break down with clarity and ease, like a hot knife through butter.

I’m not trying to launch or scale a business. To the extent that I am, I am a self-employed writer pursuing a craft that keeps me interested and engaged with little consideration of more profitable ventures. I navigate the market enough to keep going, and that’s exactly how I want to live. He’s pretty explicit about what he’s selling: sales itself. The product is circular and self-referencing; often it’s so exposed as to become absurd, like when he justified the $5,000 cost of a course to someone by saying its real value was understanding ‘what they didn’t need to do.’

Despite all my complaints, I watch the videos and keep watching them. Perhaps it’s as straightforward as the pleasure of hearing a confident patter; the reassuring comfort that in about 30 seconds, he will set up a tension and dissipate it, like a children’s story that pretends to be about the adult world. Sometimes I am jerked out of my stupor by the sheer callousness of his worldview: often he recommends that people abandon friendships and cut social ties to be more focused on their ‘goals'. In these moments, my attention shifts from comfort watching to being fixated on a car crash. I don’t particularly like these heightened moments. I want to return to the familiar rhythms of his ‘advice’ – and eventually the algorithm brings me back there.

I have heard his from-rags-to-riches life story a dozen or so times, and believe it less everytime I hear it. I don’t need to bore you with the details. Perhaps most interesting is how he attributes fantastical outcomes to minor daily rituals, such as the Pomodoro Technique which involves repeated short bursts of focus. His narcissism invites me to consider my own: What kind of life story would I tell about myself? I could lean into soliciting empathy: raised by a single mother; disconnected from cultural centres in rural Ireland; an awkward stuttering kid who managed the courage to fight bullies; moved to a new city with no connections and persisted. But I know it's fiction, and I would feel embarrassed talking about myself that like that, knowing that everyone knows I’m lying. My childhood was good and pleasant; I had friends and interests and always felt supported at home, even if we didn’t have a lot of money for superfluous things.

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His life story is a form of content to pitch productivity hacks. Perhaps I keep watching because I think there’s a mystery to solve; I am fascinated by a psychology that is so raw and on the surface yet disguised, hidden, and totally alien to my own sense of what a meaningful life would look like. People lie all the time: I keep thinking about how former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, someone who has always shown a particular affinity for the business-oriented Silicon Valley-adjacent world, repeatedly said he woke early in the morning – around 5 or 6am, if I recall correctly – to run on his treadmill, but the device got hacked and it showed he had done so once or so during his entire premiership. I believe he believed it when he said it: he identified as someone who woke up at sunrise to run, and that was good enough.

There’s a big difference between creating a fake story to sell something, a classic form of hucksterism that deserves its own kind of respect due to the longstanding history of such blatant conning, and lying to yourself, probably because you admire others who posture in this way. I am equally repulsed and beguiled by these characters. How do they live like this? Very well is the answer.

Ed Ruscha

I can feel the sun on my feet from the asphalt because I'm wearing sandals. I shuffle through a parking lot because that’s what you do here. The charcoal gray has taken on a slight yellow hue, the distance blurs from the heat. Cruel like a desert, the standard parking lot is hot, dry and unforgiving.

People wander through parking lots, dragging their bodies without any hope of finding respite along the way. Accidents tend to happen here because people believe it is safe, or perhaps they don’t believe it is a real place at all.

Asphalt is the dominant material of choice, despite its inherent inhospitality – it is cheap, can expand and contract with the weather, and allows water to easily drain off. The asphalt, the uncompromising flat planes, the undecorative scale, the raw functionality, all the aesthetic components of the parking lot are born from industry, yet it lacks the underlying utopian vision that undergirded other vestiges of modernism. Like a machine for living, the parking lot is a void for shopping.

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Writing about cars, urban space and America used to talk about the journey – the first essay of this sort I remember reading was Christoper Hitchens’ The Ballad of Route 66, although Hunter S. Thompson’s shadow clouds the genre – and in recent years, writers increasingly expresses a perverse fascination with motorways. Rebecca Solnit reflects: ‘when I got home I would find that the hours I’d spent negotiating freeway merge lanes and entrances and exits and parking garages was, in some mysterious way, more memorable than the museums. I was supposed to have a head full of paintings or installations, but instead, I was preoccupied with the anonymously ugly spaces that are not on the official register of what any place is supposed to be.’

Parking lots are a space that are as ugly to experience as they are to think about. The best argument for parking lots is to consider them as vestiges of pure modernism. The Futurists would hate them, of course, as the parking lot is where machines slow down and stop, not to achieve superhuman speeds. They are modest, domestic. Connected to the car-led revolution of urban space, parking lots – specifically those that are open, flat and made from asphalt, not multi-storey garages or ad hoc meanwhile spaces – are not just products of the 20th century, but speak to one of its overlooked tendencies: non-utopian modernism.

I am not walking through an anonymous non-space of globalisation, but a semi-suburban parking lot in a secondary city of Florida. American in more ways than one, the parking lot appears to me as the unofficial monument of the country, differing from its established icons that explicitly borrow from an old European tradition of architecture, namely Roman and Greek. Baudrillard said that Disneyland was invented so people will believe America was real. By contrast, we don't evaluate or judge the parking lot. It is so boring as to barely register: our eyes look for a spot then immediately turn our attention to where we are going next.

Guy Debord once claimed ‘the final form of commodity fetishism is the image’, and who takes better images of parking lots than Ed Ruscha? His are Californian, specifically from Los Angeles, where the romance of traveling the vast expanse of America typically ends.

Ruscha’s series is dated to 1967. He published 30 or so photographs taken by Art Alanis during a helicopter ride around Southern California early on a Sunday morning, capturing the growing urban sprawl of the city in a distanced, deadpan style. Caught through an aerial view, it is perhaps the only way to actually see a parking lot without simply looking through it.

I admire parking lots, but I don't like them. In fact, I hate them. But you have to admit: A tremendous level of order is achieved by the most modest means. Paint in a simpler, rectangular grid pattern manages the flow of people and machines, made all the more effective by its seemingly crude appearance. There are few other innovations possible.

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The addition of payment mechanisms in the contemporary flat and open-air parking lot ruins what idiosyncratic beauty it can legitimately claim, often necessitated by the privatization of public infrastructure. That being said, the parking lot is not a result of social democracy and the wider orientation of cities around cars speaks to a totalitarian alliance between narrow notions of individualism and interests of the automobile industry.

As an architecture, the parking lot is diffuse and impersonal, even more so than the corporations attached to them. Each franchise of the chain may be identical to each other, but there is a singular character that they replicate, a brand they work to create. The parking lot, by contrast, is broadly similar regardless of its context. All corporations compete, all corporations share the parking lot.

Some reading

Urban designer Eran Ben-Joseph charts the evolution of the humble parking lot.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/brief-cultural-history-of-the-parking-lot/

Fredric Jameson talks about Rem Koolhaas and the future of the city for New Left Review in 2003

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city.pdf

Also in New Left Review, an interesting reflection on Marxism, green politics and infrastructure in contemporary Japan through an interview with Kohei Saito

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii145/articles/kohei-saito-greening-marx-in-japan

And ‘Check out the parking lot’ by Rebecca Solnit in London Review of Books

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n13/rebecca-solnit/check-out-the-parking-lot

Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins.

I didn’t expect there to be so much cottage cheese. In the world of online gym and workout advice, a special emphasis is placed on high-protein foods for a number of interrelated reasons. The first, perhaps most obviously, is the relationship between protein and building muscle. On multiple forums, the science is explained at length by amateurs to each other: the process of muscle growth involves hypertrophy, where the muscle is pushed to breaking point and ‘rips’, which can then be filled by protein thereby building a new, stronger and expanded muscle.

A second more subtle advantage that protein offers is how it satiates the appetite, supporting weight loss goals. You don’t just want to bulk; your mass must be lean. Protein is a ‘complex’ nutrient and takes longer to break down. All foods are not the same despite what macro numbers might lead you to believe: a croissant and an unseasoned chicken breast are around 250 calories, one person opined, but eat two of the former and you’ll be hungry again in an hour.

One recipe did a lot of work to seemingly obscure the cottage cheese. A kind of beef burrito with the standard onion, spices and beans also involved a faux-cheese mixture of scrambled eggs and cottage cheese. The ratio of fat to protein was high, and the soft texture of the mixture mimics the satisfying ooze of fast food – it’s enough like the real thing while ticking the correct boxes on your food tracking app.

Peanut butter is a common go-to ingredient, but dig a little deeper and its credentials become less convincing. The amount of protein is good, but it’s often high in sugar and therefore isn’t as efficient (food, workout routines and lifestyles are regularly quantified through their relative efficiency). The hardcore advice doesn’t come through comments, videos or recipes, but in spreadsheets and that’s where the myth of peanut butter was first busted for me; spreadsheet discourse is on another level. I don’t know if any of this is true; I am fascinated by how communities are drawn together not just by an activity or interest, but a set of truths that are claimed and repeated with enthusiasm.

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I think it is easy – if not a little trite – to disparage the gym bro, like a fish in a barrel they are a commonly agreed target, with much of society's ills laid at their feet. So much so that many men who attend the gym will also poke fun at the caricature to make it clear that they are different, despite their own penchant for tracking calories, reps and routines, while many women who workout will ironically identify as such.

Similarly too, the culture of self tracking is quickly equated with other metric bound systems and their faults: the relentless call of the to-do list, the inhuman pace of capitalism, the cruel indifference of bureaucracy. Ultimately a food or fitness app introduces an element of gamification and impersonal guidance, adding direction to what can often feel like the seemingly impossible task of changing your body.

All this might echo the ‘toxic’ traits of shallowness, productivity and gambling. We look at ourselves in judgement, we only feel good when meeting some arbitrary standard of goodness, we chase a dopamine high despite its short termism. In response, the culture of gyms and workouts have developed a new vocabulary for itself. Terms like weight loss are obscured with euphemistic references to body image; strength is substituted for emotionally oriented goals like mental health. The recovery benefits of protein are emphasised over its role in muscle growth.

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What is interesting about the cultural phenomenon of these gym-specific recipes is not just the emphasis on macros, but it’s often explicit about who the audience is. Not just men, but men who are also new to cooking with any level of intention. Going to the gym has framed the act of cooking and the needs of nutrition in a different light, both obviously gendering it in a way that makes sense to them, but also compelling them to want more from a meal than simple alleviation of hunger. These recipes must navigate the complexity of health for a wide array of people while also introducing a new skill set, and don’t forget the emphasis on convenience too. It’s rare for any of these recipes to take longer than 30 minutes, and they are almost exclusively made to be meal prepped on a low budget. “That is 50 grams of protein for just 80 cents a portion”, they might say.

A lot of food culture online promises to not compromise flavour and health while also being convenient, made from simple ingredients and cheap. The pitch is typically low key: easy midweek meals and healthy food that actually tastes good. A truly extraordinary boom of food-related content has boomed over recent decades, beginning with a handful of sought after cooking books, a slow rise of the TV chef, to now a seemingly endless stream of digital content produced by self-taught home cooks and experts alike. Quietly, without admitting it to themselves or their audiences, the gym bro is also a kind of food influencer.

Nutrition is a thin science. Before the 20th century, it was a secondary concern of chemists and only became a distinct field in a relatively short space of time. One of the first university courses was established in the 1950s by John Yudkin, a British physiologist who would later write popular books on weightloss such as This Slimming Business (1958) and Pure, White and Deadly (1972).

Pure, White and Deadly, as you might reasonably assume, was about sugar, and has since become a kind of symbol of the poor science that underpins scaremongering about diets. Yet fear is a powerful motivator; it feels instinctively true that the pleasure of food might come at a cost. ‘There are few of us today whose eating habits have not been influenced by the work and the words of John Yudkin,’ reads one his obituaries, summarising his remarkable career and continuing influence.

Yudkin’s ideas can be traced back to Dunn Nutritional Laboratories in Cambridge, an early research institution that was originally founded to study vitamins, the focus of its first director Frederick Gowland Hopkins, who was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929 for their discovery.

The early history of nutritional science was, according to Kenneth John Carpenter, “the vitamin era”, and in Britain especially, the new science attracted significant institutional attention, including the Ministry of Food, the Ministry of Health, the Medical Research Council, the Cabinet Advisory Board on Food Policy.

The lack of uniform standards was a subject of concern to Yudkin: despite this interest, there was little attempt to draw coherence between efforts to improve public health. Much of his research found overlaps between poor health and social status, drawing an economic link to poor nutrition. Supplements did little to amend social inequalities, rendering the relationship between nutrition and society more complex. When he had the chance to make a change, as the Chair of Physiology at Queen Elizabeth College, he took it, creating the first university degree in nutrition in 1945, combining chemistry and biology with psychology, sociology and economics.

Yudkin’s public reputation soared as food rationing policies of World War 2 came to an end. When else could be a more perfect time to study the impact of food, particularly previously restricted ones like sugar, than at a time when millions of people suddenly had renewed access? It was as if all of the USA, Britain and Europe became a single study, and faced with a remarkable rise in heart conditions and obesity Yudkin found his culprits. His book the Slimming Business took aim at carbohydrates, with later books – Pure, White and Deadly – updating the thesis to wrangle with sugar. The historical backdrop of consumption and efforts to control it invariably take on a semi-religious dimension: gluttony or vanity, your choice.