Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once more and welcome back to Off The Fence, the newsletter that brings you tomorrow’s stories today, from the team behind The UK’s Only Magazine. Our greatest prize – the vaunted bottle of Aldi champagne – is still up for grabs for one more week, to any reader who can display their copy of Issue 16 in the strangest surroundings imaginable.
O’er the last week, comedian Stevie Martin received her copy in fine fettle, snapping a pic with such commitment to capturing our cover that we can only make out a potted plant in the background of her shot, leaving us to ponder what else is dotted around the room. Tom Wilson popped a copy beside his Brita jug in pursuit of his very own water cooler moment; Jimmy Outram took us up a mountain but forgot to get a picture, so he got one with a pint and some scaffolding, and then another up a hill. We have a few more besides, but look forward to adding to that number by the time we announce our winner this day next week. Get snapping!
To business in a second, but first, a bit of housekeeping. Last week’s sterling edition of this here Tuesletter was, within 24 hours, all over the newspapers like a pissing puppy, with our Kevin Spacey scoop being picked up by the Times, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. We’ll keep these stories coming, but we’d like to say to our fine observant friends in the media-space: buy a subscription. It’s £24.99 a year, it’s great, and it enables us to fire off top-shelf gossip with reckless abandon through the next decade. Plus, if you use us a few times in a calendar year, you can call it a tax write-off. (Note: we are not accountants and can not say for sure whether you can use a subscription as a tax write-off.)
On with the show, as they say. This week we have men of cloth on wheels of steel, the lesser spotted David Cameron, and a tribute to two titans of modern Western culture. But let us begin by introducing a new critic. Like with our Secret Chef, and Our Man in Bakhmut, we’ve sought out someone particularly embedded into their world, who we’ll call Nat Tate. Below is their first clandestine dispatch, from the latest Timothy Taylor show. All opinions, and insights, are their own.
Hockney’s Still Smoking
First to Timothy Taylor, for ‘Birdsong’; a show with good intentions but very little to excite its visitors. Walking through the door, you are met by yet more Annie Morris stacks. One might ask, ‘how many times can an artist balance coloured balls on top of one another and not get bored?’ Nine years and counting apparently. This really sets the tone for the whole show. There is some colour on a surface, yes, but it does nothing to excite or move the senses. There is little that holds the eye here.
One wall in particular, displaying the work of two recent recruits to the Timothy Taylor stable – Sahara Longe and Antonia Showering, has a distinctly GCSE feel to it. The drawing is not only bad but boring. Longe’s paint is greasy and thinly conceived. Her flatter than flat figures, outlined by token dashes of colour, look like dodgy Alex Katz copies, minus the luminosity or compositional thump. I recall being shocked by Timothy Taylor’s success at the most recent Frieze London, with a stand committed entirely to the work of Longe. They looked similar to this – but on a much bigger scale. This has done nothing to improve them. A solo presentation of her work at the gallery in June titled ‘New Shapes’ felt like the same shapes but with different colours. It was very bland.
Showering’s paintings, often described in terms such as figures occupying a dreamy landscape, which ‘err between the abstract and the allegorical’ are as vague as the description would suggest. It is unresolved wishy-washy painting. Chantal Joffe’s Self Portrait After The Bath, hanging next door, presumably to bolster the reputation of the two newbies, is not her best and looks rather like it has been dug out of the bottom of the ‘save for charity exhibition’ drawer.
Tommo Campbell’s Absolutely Everything is just that; a collage of painterly styles and random classical and floral references that are so sketchy they don’t really say anything - much like wallpaper. Here’s another younger artist who could fit the same vague description as Showering, with the same taste for illustrative paintings that occupy no firm territory.
I’m left wondering what it is about these painters that so appeals to a gallery who made its name with great artists like Sean Scully, Kiki Smith or Miquel Barcelo? Timothy Taylor would have us believe that the likes of Longe, Showering and Campbell are carrying the flame (and recent auction records bewilderingly bear this out), but a quick look on their website shows that there are very few big hitters left at the gallery, so perhaps the older generation disagree?
Despite the honourable intentions of the show, it feels like a gallery scraping the barrel.
Just round the corner, in their new home on Bury Street, Saatchi Yates has put on an exhibition of a wholly different order; titled ‘Bathers’; A theme that actually has some bearing on the art displayed, this is a painters dream, and just the tonic to restore one’s faith in contemporary art.
I can’t help but look first at Eric Fischl’s pool scene, She and Her 2017, depicting a young man, and a topless girl, watched on either side by an older man and woman clothed. You join the voyeurs, not only for the glistening bodies and water, but also the combination of electrifying narrative subtext (desire, age, youth and envy), with living, luminous, painterly paint, so loosely applied but chunkily and firmly composed that it rewards the viewer as much from 20 centimetres as it does from 20 feet.
Swinging round we are met with a truly giant canvas by Danny Fox, a relatively young painter. His rendition of siren-like figures perched in a moody aqueous landscape of lurid smoky green has the feeling of an artist at the height of his powers. This is an unsettling, intimidating painting, both for its subject, which glowers and glares at you from the mossy mists, as for the virtuosic handling of the paint on such a grand scale. Fox’s painting is defiant, it stands up and asks to be counted. It owes as much to Turner for his brooding sky as it does to Peter Doig for the treatment of his figures in the landscape; sometimes dissolving, sometimes broken up by seemingly impulsive bands of colour.
Down the other end of the line, Neil Stokoe, an unknown contemporary of Hockney and Frank Bowling at the Royal College was one time teacher to Peter Doig and, I am told by the gallery staff, castigated Doig for his bad drawing. How ironic that his painting here, Floating Figure, is so unremarkable compared to those of his unpromising student. Doig, in turn, they tell me, has said that looking at Danny Fox’s work reminds him why he paints.
There are other big names. The gallery has managed to get hold of one of Picasso’s most radical and violent nudes; Baigneuse, 1928. The bather, abstracted to an angular hexagon of split legs and pudenda could well be the talisman for De Kooning’s controversial Women series that shocked the Sydney Janis crowd in 50s New York. This is a painting that packs every corner with tension and painterly bravura – it is as jarringly brilliant now as ever.
It’s exciting to see contemporary painters hold their own alongside these masters. Kottie Paloma’s gigantic, reclining figure on a beach towel (Holiday in Bavaria, 2023) is part Picasso, part Cézanne, part Matisse’s tectonic bronze backs. This beached bather is a solid lump of human clay. The painting has the nostalgic feel of a sepia film and the sort of subtle surface that leaves you wondering how it was done.
There is lots more to ogle at. David Hockney’s Gregory in the Pool, made from hand pressed paper pulp, is the very essence of light dancing on water. No one will come close to evoking the luminosity of moving liquid and bright sunshine (partly because the colours are embedded in the very paper pulp rather than painted onto its surface). Hockney’s other painting in the show; The Swimming Lesson, like Picasso’s, is still formally interesting over 60 years on .
Hell, even Damian Hirst’s sharks look fresh in here. Swimming around on a Francis Bacon-esque white bar, which, when I saw it last in the context of an auction house, evoked something of an art world merry-go-round. Here, in this fresh white space, surrounded by figures in swimming costumes, it really works. What do they say? Context is everything?
The show ends on Thursday and with more rain in the weather forecast it may be the closest you get to bathing this summer. I strongly urge you to visit.
https://saatchiyates.com/
The Chipping Norton Set Ride Again
We’ve scored some more top-tier gossip. At last weekend’s Wilderness Festival (perhaps the worst festival in Britain), a private party was held at a new gastropub called The Bull, in the village of Charlbury. A spy at the party told us of the guest list: packed in the same tent were the trio of Carrie Johnson, Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson – one can only imagine what they were talking about.
Thankfully, our editor-at-large, the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie, will be vicar of the parish later this year, and will be on hand to offer spiritual guidance to any wayward festival attendees going forward.
Laugh Like You Used To
Clive Martin is back with another dispatch, this time from Southsea, where he visited Jim Davidson’s ‘anti-woke’ comedy night, and saw the comedians of the 1970s and 1980s – Duncan Norvelle, Bobby Davro and Jimmy Jones – replay their greatest hits to a spluttering audience.
It’s a fantastically funny and beautifully written piece, which has already proved very popular online.
Zebra, Crossing
Sophie Elmhirst is one of the leading feature writers in Britain, so it was a real thrill to have her pen a piece on the Highway Code, and learning to live life by the rule book. We are always open to these sort of fun, breezy pieces, so if you’ve got one up your sleeve, send through a pitch to editorial@the-fence.com
Deep State Dad
Margaret Mitchell’s father is a US Army veteran with a quite amazing list of achievements (have a look online), and he also had a brief friendship with James Gordon Meek, the prize-winning investigative journalist who has uncovered malpractice in the more secretive branches of the American military.
As it turns out, Meek was hiding a number of dreadful secrets from those close to him – Margaret’s piece is a fascinating primer on the conspiratorial mind in the age of Donald J. Trump.
Waugh On Woke
Have we reached peak podcast? What’s next for Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger Productions? Josiah Gogarty imagines what they could cook up if money – and human mortality – were no object. Featuring appearances from Dasha Nekrasova, John Donne, Jane Austen, Coleen Rooney and many more…
Put Money In Our Purse
If you are an existing subscriber, then you will be able to enjoy all of these articles at your leisure, if you are not, then it’s high time to sign up: a digital sub is just £14.99 for the year, a print subscription costs just £24.99. It really is cracking value, and we keep the prices low so everyone can enjoy the fruits of our bounty. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, and enjoying what we do, then today is the day: subscribe to The Fence.
Rhythmic Exorcise
The last twenty-four hours have seen the passing of two of Western art’s most transformative and powerful personalities: the director William Friedkin, and the master of the modern two-step, DJ Casper. While most broadsheets will be leading with their tributes to the man behind Cruising, The Exorcist and The French Connection, not many will be sliding to the left, then taking it back now y’all, in honour of the singular mind who upended all possible functions for line dancing in the 21st century.
So it turns out, Casper – who wrote the Cha-Cha Slide for his nephew, a personal trainer in Chicago – ended up in vicious dispute with the music arm of the feared Chicago street gang, The Black Disciples, over the royalties for his iconic kiddy-pleasing floorfiller. The protracted legal fight is said to have exhausted Casper, who slipped off into relative obscurity and denounced the one hit wonder in 2016.
All the same, despite suffering from numerous ailments, Casper was set to appear at the Popworld festival in Derby last Saturday, and by all accounts liked the positive response the Cha-Cha Slide still received, even if he’d long since grown tired of the song itself. Respectfully, for Friedkin and Casper, everybody clap your hands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZv62ShoStY
The Sovereign Beauty
One place which will continue to be free to air is our Instagram account, where we are continuing to upload prime slices of the magazine. In Canonbury, you will find an elegant Georgian house that was for many years the home and office of Basil Spence, the (in)famous brutalist architect. It got us thinking: where did the leading British architects of the 20th century choose for their private residences? There are loads of unheralded moments of beautiful modernism (and the odd baronial castle) within. The whole spread within the magazine, designed by Mathias Clottu and drawn by Miki Lowe, is one for all you Dezeen heads, too.
In Case You Missed It
Fence supremo, Charlie Baker, takes AirMail on a meditative stroll through modern Soho, accompanied by beauteous illustrations from Paul Cox.
Tom Stevenson on the fading glamour and reduced venison budgets of 21st century diplomats, for the LRB.
At Vulture, Alison Wilmore asks whether we should have to grade Barbie on a curve?
From hippie to hard-right: James Ball charts the alarming wellness-to-fascism pipeline that’s propelling yogis to conspiracism.
Semafor have the scoop on the incendiary video memes that have hobbled Ron deSantis’ presidential campaign.
We’re not above taking extreme pleasure from this Tiktok plagiarism beef between two creators intent on making the worst interiors ever seen by mankind. (Part, the second.)
And Finally
World Youth Day celebrations were in full effect this weekend in Lisbon, as hordes of relatively young people descended on the city of light to pray, party and profess their Catholic faith. And they did so in fine numbers, with as many as 1.5 million papist pilgrims amassing to, well, mass en masse.
On hand to corral the faithful were some 700 bishops and 10,000 priests, none of whom caught our eye quite like the irresistible star of this week’s video, Fr Guilherme Peixoto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Iruq7b34xI
A native of Braga, the Portuguese padre is also a successful house DJ, known for playing massive open air shows to raise money for his parish. He was, therefore, a great choice to lead the Romanist revellers in a pre-mass warm up sesh at 7am this Sunday. With the sun rising over the Tagus he led his faithful toward prayer with a 30 minute set of beatific bangers, not least his own track (around 7mins into the above video) Non Abiatte Paura, (‘Be Not Afraid’). Perhaps mindful of licensing, the good father didn't stick in a feature credit but it does indeed have John Paul II on vocals.
While we can’t vouch for every selection in his set – he leans toward more of a reach-for-the-lasers niche than we prefer here at Fence Towers – we cannot fault the immaculate vibes of him playing vaguely sinister house music to a sea of young Catholics and a truly preposterous collection of tall-hatted churchmen, cut straight from a level of Hitman.
It also ranks as the first time we’ve ever seen the YouTube commenting hive mind giving a timestamped breakdown of a DJ set into its liturgical sections.
For that, if for no other reason, we can only say: Amen, brother.
There we have it! Another edition in the can. Drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com if you want to ask us anything, send us Issue 16 snaps, or pitch us your masterpiece – we’re all ears. Catch you next Tuesday.
All the best,
TF