Your favourite Debbie is back.I planned to see two exhibitions when I got to Paris. I got there on the train Thursday last week. On Friday I went to Love Songs at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie and All Together, a group show of erotic art curated by The Tom of Finland Foundation, at The Community Centre. I was waiting around the corner from the Maison for it to open, sitting out front of a cafe pretending to be cool, speaking in broken French and applying CeraVe facial moisturiser to my arms because I forgot to pack sunscreen. I finished my cool cigarette and went inside, bought my ticket and went upstairs.The show, Love Songs, features the work of fourteen photographers ranging in period from the mid-20th century to the present day. Spread between four galleries, across two floors; Nan Goldins face Larry Clarks; Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) has a room their own. Earlier photographs by René Groebli and Emmet Gowin, black and white silver gelatine prints, feature early-feeling displays of intimacy. The napes of necks, exposed chests, finger-viced cigarettes and depictions of languid cohabitation. The exhibition follows a linear chronology, the next rooms show works from Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1973-1986) and Clark’s Tulsa (1963-1971). Both iconic and infamous. Among easier images, there are depictions of domestic abuse, Goldin’s eye bloodshot and bruised, and substance abuse, the long end of a needle in the straightened fold of an arm. Leigh Ledare, a former assistant to Clark, has work upstairs. Double Bind (2010) is a display of two shoots, both orchestrated with his ex-wife Meghan Ledare-Fedderly over three days in a cabin in New York. The first shoot took place two months from the next, first with Ledare, the artist, the ex-husband, and the other with Adam Fedderly, her current husband. Like the rest of them, the photographs hope to be interpreted by the audience, here more overtly. Seeking some secret out, something obvious in the way Meghan Ledare-Fedderly is holding herself or looking at the machine that’s captured her image. Both shoots, largely arranged in diptychs around the room, are neither romantic nor feelingless; oscillating along the axis, whizzing past apathy.Though the show was enjoyable and the photographs beautifully manufactured, and though it is an obvious criticism, the voyeuristic nature of the exhibition is a detraction. It’s an impossible show to curate. The majority of the subjects are women, are white, and the majority of the artists are men. The majority of the photographs depict heterosexual intimacy. This isn’t to say no exhibition can be complete or good without perfect diversity. It’s that in the context of an erotic show, a show about romance and sex, the viewer is more conscious of the curator than the artworks in the exhibition. I wasn’t trying to get off, I went elsewhere in Paris for that. I felt like someone might have been trying to. The viewing of these arrangements of images, here deemed intimate, are akin to leafing through the intimates of a porno stash or a stranger’s camera roll. Sex is not romance. The MEP’s show first deals in affection, established as a love song in photographs. The exhibition is normative and merely beautiful. Proficient photographs are arranged around famously erotic artefacts.I bought two postcards before I left. One of Sienne (1979) by Hervé Guibert and the other Green Light (2010) by Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223). The pictures are still nice, I’m allowed to be a hypocrite. I then took the train up to The Community Centre.The following is a brief aside to aesthetically categorise erotic art. First, before I start drooling over graphite renderings of inflated pecs and bulging cocks, I have a diagram. Constructed, bored, in the waiting lounge of the Charles de Gaulle airport.My issue upon seeing the work at the MEP was the difficulty in assessing the disparate qualities of each series in the show. Some work, Guibert’s, is proficiently produced, romantic and slightly sexual. His lover lies in a bath, exposed to silver gelatine, the light refracting on spots of water in gentle movement. Other’s, Zhipeng’s, is more naively produced, less romantic, and more sexual. A white-filled condom hangs from the stems in a vase of flowers in a flash photograph. Assessing the two simultaneously hurts my brain, hence the diagram. Two horizontal axes show the space between sex and chastity and between romance and unfeeling, a vertical axis of proficiency crosses both at their centre and divides the space between professionalism and naivety. At the centre of all axes, is a sphere somewhat resembling neutrality. It is the amateurism between naivety and professionalism, the apathy between romance and unfeeling, and the abstinence between sex and chastity. Zhipeng’s flowers are a little naive, somewhat romantic (not much) and pretty sexually explicit. The photograph’s placement can be seen below. All Together is another erotic group show, featuring the works of Tom of Finland, Nigel Kent, TANK, Bob Mizer, Annie Sprinkle, Al Urban and many others. After a lap of the circuit, I had two pressing thoughts. Pressing Thought No. 1: How expensive can wall decals be? How hard is it to label an artwork? And they’re not the only ones. I’m looking at you, The Burrell, the CCA. Instead of a sticker beneath each work, the curators decide to put up a cryptic map either on the wall or in a pamphlet. I’m not here to do orienteering. I don’t want to have to stop and think, ok so two right from the second one down but past the one that’s in the circular frame, just to find the title or material of a piccy. Sort it out.Pressing Thought No. 2: Is there a relationship between exceptional technical rendering and lewd acceptability? In all those black and white photographs taken on honeymoons at the MEP, the subtext is that they were f*****g, right? Obviously. It isn’t explicit, but the aesthetic is there. There’s more space in The Community Centre to feel your eyes change. From those receiving a respectable nude, a naked image, an explicit artwork, or a piece of pornography. In some works by Tom of Finland, TANK, and The Hun, the technical proficiency in graphite and coloured pencil, for a moment, renders the explicit invisible. TANK’s pencil drawing, The Barn, is one such example. A drawing of cowboys, one in the door of a barn—ass to the audience—and the other spread-eagle in denim on a hay bail, hand on crotch. Too careful as to be rude. Taught denim drawn on thick thighs and wet-highlighted skin demand a museum gaze. Close to the picture, nose to crotch. The images aren’t passed in a classroom. It’s obvious to write, but the drawings are in frames. Mike Kuchar’s 1992 untitled caricature sits in an amateur aesthetic, curb-side to the street, depicting two ginger pirates with enlarged nipples, huge bellybuttons and streaming white dicks barely contained by knotted fabric underwear. Popeye-impossible muscles erupt from every circumferential line. The images are kitschy, throw-away, and ostensibly offensive. I’m not about pitting those works against each other, they’re different and call for different eyes. The latter highly sexual, void of romance and completed with competent, caricature amateurism.Both shows are a pic ‘n’ mix really. The kinds of shows where you go in for what you want to see. A museum experience, you don’t have to look at everything. If I’m not interested in 18th-century British art, I’m not going to the room in the National Galleries. Give it a miss. I was on holiday, that’s exactly the kind of experience I want. I’m not about to give myself a hard time, only to indulge in endless pleasure. I do think there are fun and exciting ways to treat the reception of erotic art in museums and galleries, outside of mere beauty. Plotting those aesthetic categories in a diagram is only my little psycho way of doing it.—Andy x This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

Is DIY dead? Again? I have coined another little term because I love to do that.I went to a couple of events during an experimental music festival called Counterflows. I haven’t anything to say about that. I’m not a music critic. Not my bag, not my baby. I saw some things I liked. Whatever, I was at an event and I was thinking about production, scale, aesthetics and professionalism. Festivals are horrible, they don’t work for my brain. Programming fifty plus events for a weekend or week or two week period overwhelms my delicate, soft, smooth, thinking-bag and, either, I try to see everything or quit before it even starts and reject the idea entirely. Regardless, the festival is a professionalised site. It’s flashy, it’s big, it’s built on correspondence and meetings and contracts with artists. It’s for networking with like-minded professionals. Art-adjacent festivals are like business conferences for the funemployed artist. People don’t like professionals. I don’t like professionals. I can’t be bothered with it, businesspeople on computers? Emailing? I don’t like the look of it. A lot of people don’t. And yet, are we not all professionals? Of course, we’re all required to use the computer. Even for the least of professional tasks. I’m not writing, I’m word processing. I’m not watching YouTube videos, I’m depressed.If everyone’s a depressed professional, and if everyone might not like the look of that, how do people feel good about themselves?Faux Naive Professionalism is only the latest iteration of self-institutionalisation. And no, I didn’t write that graffiti on Sauchiehall Street. Love the institution, hate the institution, become the institution. Rinse, repeat, alopecia. A process that has taken place since the first single-cell organisms participated in alternative-education group workshops and gallery committees. F.N.P. rejects exploitation, working for free without benefit, and aluminium salts in deodorant. F.N.P. is making work to brief, making work to residency scheduling, and soft networking. It’s carefully constructed photo-dumps and being interviewed over email. Being on all the time and available for hire. F.N.P doesn’t look professional. The aesthetic isn’t office building, break-room small talk, ergonomic chair, repetitive strain. F.N.P. is the worst conversation you’ve ever had at a gallery preview, delivering workshops for the CV, wearing wide-legged trousers that don’t hit the floor, ELF bars and labouring.Being an artist is being professional (duh). Somewhat by force, the artist is pushed into freelance self-employment; into tax returns, budget drafting, meetings, usage rights, sales deals and exploitative contracts. A businessperson, nothing new. Yet, like bad-on-purpose drawing, non-professional professionalism, the faux naive aesthetic, is a supportive crutch for engaging and/or disengaging with proficiency. Professionals trying to look cool by looking bad at their jobs. I’m not interested in saying that professional artists are a blight on the earth. That would be unfair and that would describe every artist as a blight on this earth. I’m interested in the conflicting aesthetic terms artists and art-adjacent workers define themselves. At the festival that may as well be a conference, rubbing shoulders, floating on a garbage barge, going to Venice. Have we agreed to these terms of engagement? Do we want to be professionals or are we strong-armed into it by every conversation in the pub that inevitably steers in the direction of ‘work’ rather than ‘artwork’?I was on a residency, shocking I know, years ago with eleven other artists. We were all sitting on chairs, in a circle, in an extension built onto an old house, listening to two art professionals from an annual artist moving image festival talk about their programme. The topic of conversation turned to pay, and an unnamed professional in the room came out with, “So if you weren’t being paid you just wouldn’t do anything?” And then everyone said, “No.” And I agreed with everyone even though I had taken two weeks off to go on an unpaid residency, we all had. Largely because the benefits outweighed the costs. The residency is now funded (just FYI) which is good. Yet the image I believed in, about myself, was that of the professional; even though I was good with being nothing of the sort. On paper, I was the professional artist (thank you) and IRL I was a mess. Happy to go on holiday and eat a free meal.The counter to professionalism and the faux naive variety is DIY. And those two binaries have smudged bad, like my lip line four years ago. DIY culture, doing it yourself, putting on shows, gigs, whatever, without institutional backing is totally out of favour. A DIY aesthetic is key to the F.N.P.’s self-image, except no one I know makes work unless there’s a Creative Scotland logo on the poster. And I mean ‘makes work’. Artists are designers for opportunity briefs from Gov and Non-Gov bodies. There are only so many opportunities, only so many galleries and institutions to work with. That’s why I know artists yet to show in the city they live in. No one is doing it themselves. Instead, they’re holding out for the space to free up in a local institution. In the meantime, showing work in cities no one lives in because the rent’s too high (see: Edinburgh). It’s all much too over-professionalised.I can feel myself being misconstrued, it burns; “artists shouldn’t work for free”, “what do you expect me to do”, “I make art out of diamonds”, “I want to be famous” or whatever. I just think some artists could stand to be a little more creative. That’s the job. Make cheap work. It doesn’t all have to be Jesmonite and EcoPoxy. Show work in all those empty shops that have closed down since the death of the high street. I’m being selfish, and I think that’s fine, I want to see more art. I want to see smaller artists too. Not only those on the Pipeline® (Graduate, Hospitalfield, Grad Job, Platform, Bothy Project, Freelands Foundation Resident, Satellites, Cove Park, Margaret Tait (Residency/Award), Glasgow International, Edinburgh Arts Festival, Berwick, and then like Representative for Scotland at the Venice Biennale). Where does everyone else show? There are only like eighteen galleries in Scotland.I’m a hypocrite, that’s not news. I’m as faux naive professional as the rest of them. I’m just expressing my frustrations with a system that places too much significance on having boring conversations. One where opportunities for success are held in the hands of under-qualified and out of touch gallery curators and facilitators, where no other route appears viable than the stinking Pipeline®. I’m full of angst. I’m going to find my copy of the Rookie Mag Yearbook (2014), listen to Live Through This (1994), watch Ghost World (2001) with Scarlett Johansson and then get my nipples pierced.—Andy xNote: I don’t think artists should have to cough up all the money by themselves, given how hard paying for things is right now (although some of you have the money and I know it). I wish funding was more readily available outside of affiliations with institutions. I wish there was more of an appetite for independent exhibitions and art. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

Very much a diary entry, very much not a series of reviews based on coherent vision or thought making. More Alexa Chung’s It, less whatever it is I’ve been trying to do for the past six months.I got out of bed at six-thirty to go work on my glutes at the gym. Already set up for failure, when the latter task of the day is to stand upright for upwards of three hours. There were three exhibitions and a launch on that evening. Aitor González at the brand-spanking-new Robert’s Gallery, Moira Salt and Fiona McGurk at 16 Nicholson Street, Hamish Chapman at Kendall Koppe and the launch of Nothing Personal issue two. A fully booked day, double-booked, overbooked, overstrained, overstimulated. It was quasi-awful. We went to Robert’s first.Robert’s is a new tenement flat-gallery, à la Suede and Celine. Although out of all of them I think Robert’s smells the best, like an Aesop washbasin. The gallery inside the flat, a room about the size of a large bedroom, has exposed plaster walls and blocked-up window, about fifteen fluorescent strip lights (I didn’t even know that was possible) and eleven of Gonzalez’s drawings and two paintings. The exhibition is called A bark in the night woke me up to a bed with no sheets, which I think is funny. The drawings are scribbled with ink and Sharpie, powder blue and black, and some feature a house wearing little booties in a variety of poses; exultation, distress, creeping-about. Like if a cartoon house were a character actor and had headshots for obtaining a role as a Bradshaw-type. And there’s a picture that looks like a dog, although the work’s untitled so I could be wrong (Untitled #1? #6? #8?).The drawings I liked, and I was with people I liked, talking, but there was a turn. Remember those fifteen fluorescent strip lights and no window I mentioned earlier? So do I. Trauma. One minute, we’re talking about the upcoming vibe shift and then the vibe shifted. A microcosmic class system emerged; some people had plastic cups, beer cans. Warm Red Stripe. Did you bring that with you? No one brings a plastic cup from home. Is there a bar? This is a home, it smells like Resurrection Aromatique Hand Balm, we can’t just walk around. Then an old friend said hello to me who I hadn’t seen in years, who I didn’t recognise, and I froze because I didn’t have a little plastic cup of vinegar. Now, these whimsical drawings are taunting me. That little house has set me up to fail. We left. We got the subway to 16 Nicholson Street.‘They should have a shuttle bus.’Who organised all this? Do none of you talk to each other? Someone organise a curators group chat. It sounds awful but it’s what you all deserve.We got to 16 Nicholson Street in time for a performance by Moira Salt, the place was packed—about half a dozen tree-root/branch structures hung from the ceiling—but there was equal-opportunity wine to drink. The performance was about to begin, a sit-down-reading-with-movement-artists kind of performance, and then a little kid started being real vocal which was cute and funny. The kid was removed from the building by force. And the performance was serious, not cute and not funny. About structural racism as manifested in health access inequality, and in education and in work, and dying in childbirth. The room was cramped and should have been ticketed. The space was neither generous for the performers nor the audience. We forgot to see the rest of the show because someone said the next one was closing soon. And with a second round of whiplash and a glass of wine on an empty stomach, we went to Kendal Koppe.The last exhibition was Hamish Chapman’s paintings; big oil on canvas saleable art. Probably my favourite of the night. Like Robert’s, Kendal featured eighteen to twenty-four fluorescent strip lights but unlike Robert’s there were windows. And a bucket of beer bottles on ice. Coronavirus is totally over too because last year there’s no way anyone would get away with putting a bottle opener on a string next to a bucket of beer. Chapman’s paintings are of the nape of necks, hair clips, hoop earrings, eyes, and ‘the court’. Cold, a little bit sad, great texture and dare I say c-word. Much better in person, I would go see it if I were you. As the last stop of the night—so sorry to Nothing Personal, one could even say it’s nothing personal—I felt pretty at ease. Knowing that most people’s skin is showing up bad (see: mottled) under the lights is a great equaliser. Social capital dissolves under fluorescents. Everyone went to Bonjour and I said ‘I’m going home’. I ate noodles and went to bed.—Andy xAlso: does anyone have a room I can move into from May in Glasgow? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

800 words.It’s not a review, I’m working out a thought. We are in the middle of a moment, questioning the role of the museum. It isn’t much of a conversation, though, or at least not one with another person. More muttering while performing a routine task. Museums are slow-moving institutions. I think the museum, as an idea and as a system, isn’t being questioned but adopted in art galleries. Overtly and otherwise. But what does it mean to present work like it were in a museum? Last weekend I went to three exhibitions; Khvay Samnang’s Calling for Rain, a multimedia exhibition centred around a video installation with rain simulation machines, ten forest vine woven masks and several photographs; Amartey Golding’s Bring Me To Heal, a multimedia exhibition centred around a two-channel video installation with a garment made from human hair and several photographs and paintings; both at Tramway, Glasgow; and Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s An Experiment with Time, a multimedia exhibition centred around a two-channel video installation with jacquard loom tapestries, painted clay balls, scans of the reverse of archival photographs, limestone slabs, and other objects under Perspex display cases; at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.  I have grouped these works not because they’re similar, the three exhibitions are all different, but because their presentation is. I don’t claim to be in the room when decisions get made (please hire me) so I can only assume it’s either that curators think alike, or artists think alike, maybe both. The video installation with accompanying props or costuming curatorial play is a tired one. From my understanding of some sports, a play is a routine (but not a dance routine) or a particular manoeuvre. Opening a chess game in a particular way, with the many variations that can occur thereafter, doesn’t stop nerds from identifying the name of the opening. What compels art workers to bring the material of the video into the space? Or align themselves with the museum? Is it Institutional Critique®? Is it lazy curation? What do we have? A costume, a mask, a rock. Great. Pop it over there. Is it radical self-canonising? Is it materially important? Is it purely sculptural? Does it fill the space? It’s not always bad. In Calling for Rain, the video, the install, and the masks all worked. Unfortunately, there were still several meters of space behind, so several photographs went up to fill the space. I only write ‘fill the space’ because the material quality was so poor it was hard not to see the stark disparity between them and the other works. In Bring Me To Heal, the hair garment is presented in the museum, in the video, filmed at the V&A. From its museum spot it is worn through the space, and here it resides in Tramway; in a darkened room, a black cube museum of its own. It works. In An Experiment in Time, the material of the video doesn’t supplant itself in the space. Perhaps the tapestries appear like stills from computer-generated black and white drone footage. Regardless, it was the third room with the Perspex boxes, the little objects, and the scanned photographs that most closely mimicked the museum. What do you want me to think? Museum bad, gallery good. The artist questions the museum by mimicry, soberly presenting objects after ecological devastation in the last of its kind. The world’s last museum. The problem with museums is their continued restatement of power when presenting data or histories or art. There’s a means by which we understand objects in that presentation style; in vitrines, behind glass, and on plinths; the objects constricted by power. Made to work in relationship to others to tell a story. A museum aesthetic can become visible when a curator is merely filling a space, or presenting the contents of a video. Sometimes the material of a video isn’t good, sometimes the garment doesn’t look good in person, sometimes the medium it was contained within (the video) coats the eyes of the viewer with vaseline. Does the museum presentation style merely mean ‘important’? Significant objects go in museums, the work is significant/urgent/necessary (as all work is these days) and so will go in the gallery museum? Each of the exhibitions I saw over the weekend used/critiqued the museum to a different end; mimicking/mocking the museum, adopting presentation practices in earnest or making a new museum. I don’t have answers. I think institutional critique is an ouroboros that’s also a circle of Hell—maybe the fifth. Anyway…Why art galleries look like museums is a fun dinner-table-ready conversation topic, just like Why is everything so expensive? and How much do you pay for therapy? We can all be wrong about it together. —Andy x This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

900 wordsI didn’t start the day hoping to engage with an exhibition in earnest. I thought I would write one of my wry and pithy reviews of two shows; Moral Limb by the Scottish artist Amy Winstanley at Stallan-Brand (an architect’s office) and Pour the Fear: Solastalgic Synchronicities by Ukrainian-Canadian artist Ayla Dmyterko at Lunchtime Gallery (a book shop). I went to Stallan-Brand first. On 80 Nicholson Street, on the other side of the river, by the courthouse. The exhibition is presented in the voided foyer of a building, a narrow room with two archways punched out of the left-hand wall to the offices. Moral Limb is eight small paintings on three parallel walls. I wanted to see the show because I thought the write-up was funny. I saw it on an Instagram post—possibly a Glasgow Art Map post. And what’s incredible is that the same writing appears on the handout with the titles, dimensions and prices. I thought I was going to write a review badgering artists to stop writing about their interests in relation to their work when the former has so little bearing on the latter. And I was going to do it. I was going to write down words like ‘eco-philosophies’ and ‘trauma’ and ‘feedback loops’. I was going to quote a bit that made me side-eye my reflection in the huge glass window at the end of the room: “For [Amy Winstanley], painting is a reflection of the continual flux of all things.” But I’m not going to. I won’t do it. What I thought would be better, upon looking at the paintings, would be to write about Natural Fuzz. To write about a style of painting haunting me from every gallery around here. Natural Fuzz is a sheeted ghost knocking my lights out. I’ll throw out some descriptors, some tell-tale signs. Hardly any paint. Visible canvas weave. Natural, figurative forms. Impressionism and Ab Ex’s horrible daughter with a dry brush. Washes. The colour brown. Dare-I-say, café art, but ironically—but not even art for inside a cafe—art that would match the colour palette and tone of a 1990s internet speakeasy. And some names: Amy Winstanley (duh), Stephen Polatch, Patrick Mcalindon, Jessie Whiteley, Andrew Sim, James Owens, and our next exhibitor, Ayla Dmyterko. And I was going to write it. I was excited. I ran (I didn’t run) to Lunchtime because I know they love curating Natural Fuzz. I knew they’d have something. Ayla Dmyterko paints warm eco-oriented paintings on linen, the weave exposed under thin layers. Her exhibition, Pour the Fear: Solastalgic Synchronicities, features six paintings and two ceramics, an embroidered postal bag and a couple of t-shirts and a video (not in the space) and a book (which I couldn’t find). I didn’t see it, the book. I said earlier, the show was in a bookshop. Can’t see the book shop for the books? No! I couldn’t see the book for the bookshop! Apologies for not finding the book. Bad critic.I will preface my thinking-out-loud criticisms, I do like the paintings. And I do like Natural Fuzz. I liked Amy Winstanley’s paintings too but unfortunately, that’s not why we’re here. I’m not trying to review an exhibition in earnest. I will touch on Dmyterko’s still life floral arrangements encased in found wood frames and melted beeswax, and the more abstract landscapes found at Stallan-Brand, for fun. At Lunchtime, some of the paintings are close studies of floral interiors à la O’Keeffe and others are still life; table, vase, window; set-ups à la literally everyone else. Some of the flowers, the sunflowers, are alive and others look dead. Resurrected by swirling pink and yellow roots made from light (The land gives everything and takes everything away, 2021). And there I was having an aesthetic experience in a book shop, liking artwork. They got me!There’s a gallery text too, by Lauren Fournier, which is the key to having more than an aesthetic experience. With a piece of risographed paper you, too, can have an intellectual one. The text reads like a very short Fitzcaraldo Edition you were convinced was going to be good because of the blue cover. And it might be good but you’re not sure. Gallery texts (catalogue essays) turn writers into such cucks for artists and curators. The writing is fine. I have no qualms. I’m actually at capacity for qualms. I can’t take on any more qualms. No thanks. If I have one more qualm I’ll burst.I began the day viewing art, excited to poke fun at the arrangement of art adjacent buzzwords nestled in theory and topical discourses. Decolonise the eco-mind to relieve the trauma of the Western paradigm crisis. And I was eager to tell some people that their paintings look kind of similar. And I was going to ask if they were all in on it? (Do you have a group chat? A shared Pinterest board?) And I saw some art I liked and read a bit of intellectualism. And here I am, back where I started wondering what a syncretistic philosophical practice is? And I wonder, now, for how long I can quote art writing in bad faith for my own enjoyment? Haha—Andy x This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

800 words5 mins listeningI was sitting in front of a video. I heard what sounded like a kid thrown against a wall echo from the other room. I watched Sharon Hayes’ new work Ricerche (2021) on the opening day, from two until five. Like most these days, the opening was longer, midday, all day. The gallery, The Common Guild, attracts an older crowd. An older lot often bring a younger group of kids. The rooms were noisy, I'll get over it. The Common Guild is currently baseless. The rumour I heard was that their townhouse location on Park Circus, a rich bit of the West End, was reacquired by whichever benefactor had granted them its use in the first place. Before the lockdown, the gallery was giving talks around the city. Now exhibitions appear to be happening in makeshift spaces. The work, which I will get to, is on show in the old Adelphi Terrace Public School at 5 Florence Street. The location was an exhibiting space during the last Glasgow International Festival. It hasn’t been a public school for a while. Again, why am I crying about kids screaming in a school? The American artist Sharon Hayes has presented three works, multi-channel videos, on each floor. Each somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes long, their content presents Hayes with her back turned to the camera questioning various groups of people. I read the text, the work uses Comizi d’Amour (1964) by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a "guidepost". I watched a bit before I went, and it is true, Pasolini does much the same in black and white—even asks some of the same questions, like where do babies come from? The questions, or rather, the answers I found fascinating were those from the women of the Arlington Impact and Dallas Elite Mustangs, both, First Division, Woman’s Football Alliance. In February 2020, a couple dozen American football players answer questions into Hayes’ wind shielded microphone. Questions like; What’s it like taking a hit? What’s it like being a woman on the field? How long have you played? What does your family think? Does playing football make you a better lover? Did you have to learn how to use your body in a different way? The answers are all complex, varying from person to person; the microphone is passed around so many can respond. The players talk about escapism in sport, taking out parental aggression, the difficulty in finding appropriate sports gear like pads that accommodate their bodies, what their relationships are like, and their dedication, gender experience, and "sisterhood". The conversation opens both participant and viewer alike to expanded thinking on gender presentation and sexuality, among other things.When I began writing a newsletter in May 2021, I posted a review of Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby. I spoke about the book and my experience with detransitioning—a component of the fiction. I identified as a woman once, I was on hormones and used she/her pronouns. I de- or re-transitioned, to a man. In Ricerche TWO (2021), the women talk about masculinity on the field. —Do you get more masculine on game day? —Yes. Urghh– it comes out, you know? It's… I mean– Yes. [Laughs]The women all talk about their different experiences with their gender on the field. What it means to them. For some their gender is something static and for others it's fluid. Gender can be in the practice, in the performance, playing a game; or it can be in neither. Recently, I joined a gym—I will be taking my congratulatory correspondences henceforth—to get ripped. I want a larger body. I want breasts, pecs; a bigger chest. Which are all different, or are they? I was once taking estrogen for the same reason alongside an anti-androgen that made me whiteout talking to a friend on a bench. I wanted certain parts of my body to look different. I still do. Yet I know that acquiring such a body inches me more masculine, more man, by modern standards. Some players see themselves the same on the field and off, others don’t. A practice, no matter what it is; sport, art, writing, goblet squats; can accommodate a resolution by repetition. The act of doing something can make it so. I drink horrible proteinaceous shakes, lift weights three times a week, write a snarky newsletter, and record video essays. And I haven’t a single bone in either of my wrists! In small performances of eclectic masculinities and femininities, I live my sad little life (Jane). In performing the reporter, Sharon Hayes asks questions and I appreciate their answers. The work is a guidepost for necessary conversations and introspective contemplations. I would recommend it.—Andy x This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

900 words5 minutesThere is a video essayist, who shares work under the handle Be Kind Rewind, that I like. Her name is Izzy and the majority of her videos centre on the Best Actress category of the Academy Awards in the United States. Who won the category? Who lost the category? Who was snubbed and who got their end-of-career-Oscar for a performance that wasn’t as good? She works with the context behind the wins and losses. I love them. There’s not much more to say. Historical reporting coupled with a fag-like interest in famous actresses does it for me. I am easily pleased (not true). And having seen a couple of these videos and extensively researched the acceptance speeches of others, I am here to write that I have won an award. I am now famous. A famous writer. I have a prize, a trophy, a gift, a present. Like Charli said; I want to win, I want that trophy.I’m not being totally serious because how cringe would that be? But I am going to express, briefly, how happy I am to feel seen for my work by an organisation that I admire. And I would like to ugly cry about it. I am in the business of embarrassing myself and today will not be the day I stop. I would like to say thank you to the one-third of you all that actually open my diary (yes I can see stats) and the four or five of you that actually read the content. To the many that don’t, I don’t blame you. It would seem like a lot to me too.Whatever. I’m done. I have said my piece. Thank you, The White Pube. Thank you, everyone else. And now we have a benchmark. If you suppose to support what I do how about you sling me a couple hundred? I went to see a couple shows over the last two weeks at the CCA and Gallery Cento. The latter is a new gallery in the Southside of Glasgow, at 20 Albert Road. I pitched my ideas about the exhibitions to a magazine that hasn’t gotten back to me. So I have no thoughts to share on the matter. I can only hold one thought, one ok idea, in my brain at a time. What I will say is that if you are receiving this before it closes, and you are near Glasgow, go see Sooun Kim and Wei Zhang’s exhibition The Auto-Buzz of Hybrid Kim and Rabbit at the Intermedia Gallery in the Centre for Contemporary Arts. I loved it. And if you’re the editor of that magazine I pitched to, please accept my pitch so I can tell everyone that one thought I had about the exhibition. Anything else? Matters of the day? The Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival started and finished last weekend. I have watched some of the work online, yet I am completely fatigued by festivals. I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t afford it. We did Glasgow International and the Edinburgh Art Festival. I’m done. Stop it. Leave me alone. There’s this feeling in festivals. Missing out on something because more work than can comfortably be consumed has been programmed over a month, two weeks or three days. I watched a film called Manifesto which I enjoyed. It’s about sneaky ways of skirting regulating management in an Oslo art school. Tutors hide window keys in stuffed toys disguised as USB drives to open forbidden windows. Students construct communal mobile kitchens disguised as white cube gallery walls, boxy and clinical from the outside. The work, which is thirty minutes in length, felt complete in the aims it initiated inside itself. The video told a story, held my attention, inspired further action and discussion on disruptive practices. It helped me reflect on a time where I was inside of a constrictive institution and on where I could have resisted better. Other than that, the festival has totally broken me. I want a show; one show in a gallery, a screening, an event; that’s exhibiting for more than twelve days. I want to go back or I want to see it two weeks after being recommended it. The festival throws so much at the wall at once and demands an audience sift through it. We are seeing rapid programming; which makes sense, given the circumstances. Curators are likely excited. “Art is back!” screamed the Edinburgh Art Festival's press release. People can see work in person. My friend Emelia, a visual artist, gave a great talk about their work installed at Nomas Projects in Dundee. I’m not as good as her, at taking things slower. A part of the talk focused on making work at a pace that works for them, particularly outside of an educational system. The festival feels like overworking. I want to get better at not feeling like I need to see everything or have an opinion on everything. Most of the time I don’t. I see a festival and think, S**t! Quick! Manufacture thoughts! Like in Manifesto, resistance can be small. It can be window keys.  I like that art is back, but I need to be spoon-fed. Not drowned in a bowl of cereal. Lest we forget, I’m baby. A very famous baby at that.—Andy x This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com

We’re back to writing little reviews again. I will be writing those longer ones with the videos, but to appease the gossip readers, I will be writing short-form diaristic reviews. This is a ‘short-form diaristic review’ of Dampbusters by Winnie Herbstein. Enjoy. xxxFri 6 Aug 2021 (that day it rained loads and my flat flooded):I got to the CCA before the rain got heavy. And before we go on, I just want to clarify; I am Carrie Bradshaw, this is self-indulgent, and I haven’t seen Sex in the City. And while we’re on the topic of self-indulgence, I look at art all the time. Nothing is more self-indulgent than an artist and their art. I saw the remains of a dumpster fire outside the other day. Make what you want of that. My titles are clickbait and I don’t care. 800 words“I’ve made a slip hazard in the foyer!” Kat got there later, by then the gallery had flooded. We were ushered out. We met her in the foyer alongside shallow pools of water. Water was dripping. The rain was heavier than I had seen it in Glasgow. Erupted drains, flooded galleries, soaked poly trousers. We’re all going to drown one day. Buy property on high ground if you have to, there’s no way any of these first-floor tenement flats are making it. Basement flat? Forget it. Doesn’t matter, the front of all of these tenements are going to fall off anyway. And not in a scaremongering way, I just totally believe it. Speaking of housing, speaking of damp, that’s the backbone of today’s exhibition. Dampbusters was put together by Winnie Herbstein—someone I don’t think I’ve met but follow online. The work is about damp houses, council houses, in Glasgow; ones that the council has no concern for, ones that the council suppose to not have mould, ones that the council alleges have been neglected by their tenants. Poorly designed ‘sick houses’ with sick people inside. No, the work doesn’t concern itself with my anxiety about rotting wood joists and crumbling sandstone, but it is concerned with damp. I went into the space, before the flood, and stood up to watch the video. In front of the video, there were two benches. Feel free to sit on a bench if you go. When I was there someone waved to me from the bench and I wasn’t exactly sure who it was at the time, so I waved back (still with no idea who it was) and chose masochism. The film feels like it could range in length anywhere from ten minutes to ten days but that’s what standing in front of a video in a gallery will do to you. Time slows down. You try to take in the room; this one was a big one, downstairs in the CCA, with a welded scaffolding in the shape of the frame of a house. The video bolted on. Artists love that. Big metal structure with a video on it. ‘Activates’ the space, or the viewer, I guess. To be honest, anything can be activated. Charcoal can be activated. Activated toning face mask video art. I was talking to a friend of mine, there at the show. I asked, in a totally friendly and well-meaning manner, “why can’t there be multiple screens and multiple little benches, so that multiple (more-than-two) people can watch the film while sitting down?” The rumour is, there was only one 4K screen. Which, ok, I understand, but part of the video is footage from a play performed in the 1990s about damp houses, with adult actors dressed up in an Aspergillus (a fungus) costume, and child actors dressed up as bureaucrats. The play was recorded before 4K existed and the video recording hasn’t been restored since. The rest is amateur-ish cam recordings of the inside of houses, the unfurling of a blueprint of a door, and the interior of a community centre. The only video that seemingly could require 4K playback might be the pretty unnecessary computer-rendered interior of an idyllic home. I have become, over the course of this newsletter, tonally akin to a viewer of Grand Designs. ‘I’d put a bench in there”, “I don’t know about that“, “maybe something with back support”, “wouldn’t you like two TVs in the house”.The video, Dampbusters, not a girl not yet a woman (liminal), is good. It sits in that murky space between documentary and video art. I think the content is amazing, with these activists and performers—do I think the art bit of the video-art-documentary is totally vital? A little bit. Could there be less of it? A little less, yes. Would my reading of the work change with less of it? Probably not. The film slows down so you can look at the plaster-blush, cast, inlays in the metal scaffolding. You can look at your phone, check out the ceiling, rock back and forth on your feet. There’s another room with another video, playing the entirety of the theatrical production. It’s on an old CRT television on the floor in front of another bench with enough space, again, only for two.The CCA like many other galleries is making slow work of responding to the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and to accessibility needs in general.Before we went into the second room, the CCA flooded because of the bad weather. A pool of water crept out from beneath the door to a cupboard and we were asked to leave the gallery. I didn’t want to be caught in an electrical fire at the CCA. I went back on a different day to look at the old TV showing the play. Inspiring, depressingly-still-timely, and good. —Andy x Centre for Contemporary Arts350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD6 August — 4 September 2021If you got this far, thank you so much. And if you haven’t already you can subscribe to my mailing list. Never miss the unintelligible complaints of an art fag again!This is only my opinion, one that is totally malleable. I, like everyone else, am a cuck to the institution. I do hope the CCA and all involved will please consider the application I sent them a couple of weeks ago, and dismiss any statements made herein. Love your hair, hope you win. —Andy x This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andygracehayes.substack.com