Something for No One

The First Annual Spigot Holiday Gift Guide

In the most wide-ranging display of curatorial acumen since Documenta 15, the editors of Spigot have put together the following selection of gift items for all tastes, ages, price ranges, and coordinates on the libertarian-authoritarian spectrum. And don’t forget the best gift of all: a hug. It’s free.

HOME FURNISHINGS

Sterling Ruby Diptych
A Spigot reader asks: “What should I buy for my brother, he loves Joe Rogan and collects knives?” Look no further than Gagosian. If your brother is into streetwear (and, given the description, he unfortunately might be), he may have heard of Sterling Ruby’s pret-a-porter stylings or even his tried-heroin-once macho slop art. Currently available on 21st Street, this series of works titled Turbine is scaled for the hall where Ruby surely believes they should be shown some day. This diptych, eloquently subtitled Shaking Hands with Bomb, is twenty feet long and offers all the existential dread, prepossession, and hack vanguardism one could hope for in a work from 1960 despite being made in 2022.

Anything from the Last Jessi Reaves Show
Stop by Bridget’s and she might let you see what Jessi Reaves she has left in the storeroom. That’s the only place you might be able to catch a glimpse of these works, since the show’s closed—I’m an idiot and only went on the last day.

Reaves makes furniture from scraps of other furniture and second-hand materials, patching it together in a way that’s hardly discreet but that doesn’t draw attention to the suturing either. An easy chair with panels of hammered metal work-light shades and novelty crockery, a wastebasket draped with flouncy netting that would make a fun cheese vault: the works seem almost functional but then again not quite. (During the show, the confusion over useful and useless, precious and banal, was heightened by the presence of four cushiony banquettes where you could actually sit.) Reaves avoids a number of easy pitfalls: the anthropomorphism that so many artists slip into when using domestic items; a pseudoacademic faceplant into the big snooze of design history; the post-apocalypticism that usually hangs over stuff made out of trash. Instead she just confronts you with objects poised in careful intellectual and aesthetic balance, refusing to declare themselves one way or the other.

A Portrait of Planet Earth

Fellas: remember Earth? You know, the Class M terrestrial body we all used to inhabit, perhaps even love (though we did have a pretty funny way of showing it a lot of the time . . .). If so, stop by Magenta Plains and pick up one of Alex Kwartler’s loving depictions of our old home, glowingly lit from behind as if during an eclipse. Hang it on the wall of your escape pod and sigh. Don’t be sad it’s over, be glad it happened at all.

HOUSEWARES

Betty Woodman Amphora
Dump your Riedel crystal on the sidewalk; that skin-contact monstrosity will taste even weirder when poured from this unwieldy yet gregarious carafe. Woodman’s woozy forms and earth-tone camo paint jobs à la Elizabeth Murray seem less to await your approach than to rotate the room around you; they’re clay propellers warping the space and, with the Greek reference, notions of the classical. Winckelmann’s old faves did have some pretty zany paint jobs, after all. Ca. 1990s, available for a limited time at David Kordansky. 

Institutional Critique BDSM Cage
Through an exclusive crossbrand with the New York fetish landmark Purple Passion (celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year!), Essex Street brings you a standing corral designed by Belgian artist Sara Deraedt for the kind of misbehavior that merits more than a stint curled up in the puppy cage. Just imagine a few disciplined hours spent swaying on one’s sore feet, arousal slowly mounting as you have a good long think about what a worthless piece of filth you are. Floor, tabletop, and wall-mounted options available in Black, Muck, and Institutional Beige. Size XS only but I mean what, you want comfort? It’s a fucking cage.

FASHION

Liam Gillick Cuck Apron
Slap one around the neck of the E-flux-loving simp in your life.

Wolfgang Hoodie
Designed by the artist himself using the palette of the Venus Transit when viewed through a pink mylar gel, this reverse-weave fleece weds the clean lines and vivid typography of the Bauhaus with day-after-the-club catatonia. Machine wash cold, tumble dry low. 

PUZZLES AND GAMES

Kerry James Marshall Solo Exquisite Corpse
TFW NO GF? Go the Kerry James Marshall route and turn the cadavre exquis toward the loneliest number. Marshall appears to have eschewed the form’s typical blind compositional method, though he does sign the works multiply: Kerry Marshall; Kerry James Marshall; KJM; Marshall, Kerry J. The self is a prism, or is it just riven by history? The paintings and drawings at Shainman (the latter especially showing off Marshall’s graphic precision) have the wild cut-up quality typical of the corpse genre as well as its humor. Some works are hectic, some are spare, most are quietly pointed. One drawing consists of the busts of three women, each with a nude man bound and balanced on her head like a parcel; a burst of peach and turquoise in the form of someone brandishing a big fish; a crosshatched ass in a tiny bathing suit; and, as a precarious base, the lower half of a woman clutching a baby as she stands in a raft at sea. Marshall’s subtitle for the exhibition: This Is Not the Game. There’s one painting that presents not a figure but a sequence of scenes like three jump cuts: a Black woman with long blonde hair regards herself in a hand mirror, a tidily shingled roof below her, both resting on the illusory foundation of a rainbow leading to a pot of gold. 

BOOKS

Which as You Know Means Violence by Phillipa Snow
Available as part of the Spigot holiday ritual-abuse gift bundle with the Institutional Critique Cage and the Gillick Apron, Snow’s recent book examines self-destruction as a trope in art and pop culture. The squeamish may skim some of the injury details, like the fine points of Johnny Knoxville’s eye-socket fracture, various of Bob Flanagan’s masochisms, and something involving the arm of Paige Ginn, vividly introduced by the author as follows: “If seeing the inside of a good-looking blonde woman on the internet no longer holds much shock value, some shock remains when that inside is the inside of her left arm.”

Which as You Know Means Violence is studded throughout with such curt, apt turns of phrase. It’s the book of an omnivore, written with an emphasis on character in an unusually fluid style despite its art-historical depth and the occasional foray into Bataille and Kierkegaard. Snow segues seamlessly from Ginn (who’s best known for falling down in public places on YouTube) to Gina Pane, Pope.L, Chris Burden, and Marina Abramović—but also to Harmony Korine, UK TV comedies, and YouTube clips like “British Lads Hit Each Other with Chair.” But the book’s prime mover and eminence grise is Knoxville. I never cared about Jackass and, having spent my time among American male youth, thought the intellectual assessment of it at the time as a mechanism for processing the Iraq War was an overread. Given Snow’s glancing reference to this thesis, I suspect she feels the same. She makes Knoxville a highly compelling character, extracting insights and also empathy without transfiguring him. Like Knoxville—real name P. J. Clapp—she declines to strain to be profound even when broaching matters of life and death.

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

AirMail Adrenochrome
What gift do you give yourself if you’re the geezer who has everything? The life-giving juice of the pituitary, harvested from Fifty Young New Yorkers Shaping the Downtown Scene (and doing it in their own image, no less, much as God bestowed us with his own visage when creating man). The plan? Make a fake web page, tell them you have some kind of “newsletter,” and give them a chance to pose for black-and-white glamour shots dressed up in leather pants and pirate shirts. Then lure them with pitchers of free martinis to the restaurant where you used to do lines with Bret Easton Ellis. When they wake up the next morning “hung over,” they’ll never notice the hole you’ve drilled in the back of their skull.

Spigot Platinum-Level Subscription
If you send Graydon Carter $5 a month, is he going to handmake you a friendship bracelet? If you send him $50 per annum, will he tell you what wine to bring to your friend’s house for pizza? Buy your loved one a Spigot subscription today and along with handcrafted cloth jewelry they’ll receive a bonus sketch celebrating the holiday of your choice.

Wine

Astor Wines E-Mail List Specials
You’re basically a scab if you don’t support the newly worker-owned Astor Wines, so get on their mailing list and snap up the deals they offer five days a week. Hate Mondays? You won’t when you get 40 percent off a fantastic cerasuolo d’Abruzzo (sadly out of stock, though you should try Amorotti's other wines). Things will sell out, so check your email when you get up in the morning.

Of course sometimes things are half price for a reason. When a 2014 Domini del Leone amarone appeared for sale one Monday, I snapped it up. Typically it’s outside my price range; nor do it typically eat the gamy foods that it goes with: amarone is typically described as rich but balanced, hardly port but fruit-sweet in the concentrated form of syrup and liqueurs. Last week I finally opened it to eat with some lamb. After it spent two hours in a decanter while I stirred and chopped, adorned with my Liam Gillick apron, I expected it to be amazing. Instead it was fine, just fine, like a grainy anonymous Bordeaux. After another hour waiting in my Sara Deraedt cage, was it better? As with the truest forms of sadomasochism, I could only use my imagination.

Turns out 2014 is the worst year for amarone this century! God bless Astor, but lean on the staff picks unless you really know what you’re doing.

Music/Travel

A Trip to New South Wales
Do people think PinkPantheress is corny? Is liking her music so 2021? All I know is that at some point I came across her to hell with it and I keep wanting to listen to it. Thus like many others I would happily accept a trip to Adelaide on Three Kings Day to see her in something called the Heaps Good Festival. Also, instead of an official video, her biggest track, “Pain,” has an official “visualiser” of a crudely animated cartoon heart bulging and changing colors in outer space. Also “Pain” has more Spotify plays than “Lavender Haze."

Spigot on Tour

Conversation with Ed Johnson at Soldes
December 4, 4 pm
Los Angeles
Attention Angelenos! On Sunday, December 4, Spigot will be appearing live and in conversation with the reclusive genius painter, Highland Park’s own Ed Johnson, whose exhibition of new work is on view at Soldes gallery in Chinatown through the end of the year. Ed’s painting is quotidian-transcendental, effulgent even in earth tones. We’ll try to keep the perspicuity casual but we also might end up talking about Bergson, you just never know. Please come by, see the art, and buy me a drink afterward. Even if I have to pay for my own adrenochrome punch, I would love to see you.