July! Strawberries at Wimbledon, tea at the cricket and good hard fun down at Ye Olde Axe on London’s Hackney Road. And also America and Independence Day! But of course Gallery Girl doesn’t buy all that Fourth of July nonsense and instead nails her colours firmly to the wacky totem poles of oppressed Native Americans. So in solidarity, Gallery Girl will be wearing the first thing on this week’s wishlist – a Navajo Nation Museum jacket as recently sported by Ai Weiwei to publicise his work Pull the Moon, a collaboration with the Navajo artist Bert Benally for Navajo TIME that takes place in Coyote Canyon before transferring to the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe in the middle of July.
In the spirit of tearing up Western hegemony, I’ll then be burning a copy of this week’s second item on my wishlist, Angus Kennedy’s book Being Cultured: In Defence of Discrimination. I haven’t read this defence of aesthetic judgement but have no doubt that somewhere it makes an argument for the Western canon that Mr Ai and myself can denounce before I chain myself to a radiator and refuse to pay my taxes.
I’m more forgiving about elderly American ladies than their fellas. So I’m happy to diarise visits to both Dorothea Tanning’s exhibition at Alison Jacques and Yvonne Rainer at Raven Row, both in London. In a nod to the latter’s work We Shall Run (1963), I shall make sure I purchase this month’s third item on my wishlist, a pair of LA Gear Woven Tracksuit Bottoms, recently available in the UK from sportsdirect.com for just £2.29, and then run around gamely for 12 minutes while humming Berlioz. I trust that Alex Sainsbury, the handsome director of Raven Row, will join me for this.
If he does I will give him a present of Marina Abramović’s limited-edition print Hands as Energy Receivers (2014), as I intend on being pretty tactile with Mr Sainsbury in our dance. The New York-based artist’s edition is priced at a reasonable £350 from the Serpentine, London, so it deserves a place on this week’s wishlist. But that’s enough of the ‘Great Satan’ (as some like to refer to America, not of course to Alex Sainsbury or indeed St Marina). The quintessentially British London gallery the Approach has a marvellously titled group show coming up called July. These titles are vitally important for summer shows that aim to shift a bit of stock while the director is getting hammered on Campari in Tuscany. This one firmly gets my vote as this year’s favourite poetic title disguising a random group show. Salute!
7 July 2014
