Wanna Kiss Myself
The brilliant art and music of Sue Tompkins. Plus the unexpected horror of Knicks in 5 and chilled French red ~for premium subscribers only~.
When you enter King’s Leap gallery, the person minding the desk stands and presses play on a small, 1980s vintage Realistic-brand mono cassette recorder. From it emerges Klove (2015), an acapella vocal composition—or is it a poem, or a fractured dramatic monologue?—by Sue Tompkins, whose paintings, textiles, and works on paper populate the rest of the space. In the piece she reels through phrases like VO talent riffing through futurist manifesti or Beckett’s Watt:
Fact fact fact fact fact fact fact fact fact fact
Noise, no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no
In me, no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no
In me no?
In me no
In me no
Wayne, purpose—I forget nothing
Wayne, prr-urpose
Weighing, purpose—I forget nothing
I forget nothing.
I don’t forget it,
I don’t forget it
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fact fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
How? Ever.
How ever
However, chain
Chain
I guess you do
I guess you do.
And so on, for nine more minutes. My line breaks and punctuation are admittedly freestyle, and it’s not even clear that Tompkins is saying “Fuck,” since between her UK accent and the erosive quality of repetition the syllable sounds more like “Fack” than anything else.
Klove provides an indispensible overture to the exhibition, for Tompkins’s work is in fact rooted in performance (of which more below), but we’ve rarely experienced it in the US. This aporia is far from fatal to viewing the rest of her output, however. While the show on view at King’s Leap, titled Wanna, is steadfastly material—analog down to her use of an honest-to-god typewriter—Tompkins’s medium is as much language as it is acrylic or ink or the body itself.
Wanna surveys Tompkins’s production over the years 2006 to 2017. The paintings tend to feature monosyllabic words singly or in pairs, rendered with a degree of drama on thorough colorful backgrounds. Get (2013) features the titular word swimming against a burnished plum and aqua field across a brief array of subtle vertical strokes—keeping irregular time perhaps, keeping count, keeping score. The very funny, lushly ugly Oh Bro (2014) wails through a series of admonishing acid-green Os that, like most of Tompkins’s renderings of that letter, take on the look of targets, as does the stabbed-up faux Manzoni Your (2014), which is cleverly, syntactically installed next to Point (2017). Tompkins’s rendering of words never really dissolves them into pure form or gives them illusionistic mass as might, say, Ed Ruscha or any of myriad other painters of words over the last century. In all cases the viewer toggles to reader, or a listener hearing in one’s head the changes that might be rung on the various phonemes.
Even better than Tompkins’s canvases are her typewritten compositions on A4 stock, some twenty of which appear here in vitrines. While they have only a passing relationship with poetry, they operate with a poet’s precision and economy. The exhibition takes its title from Wanna (from 2017, like the other typewriter works I’ll mention), which comprises a slender line of text sliding down the page, each word further from the last: WA WA WANNA KISS MYSELF. Double meaning strikes again: Initially I read the composition’s verb as KILL, turning the actual text into which it resolves as a happy alternative that never entirely banishes the possibility of its grim opposite. Derridean reading has never seemed so simple, with its emphasis on binaries and the notion of a word conjuring its opposite.
Another typewriter work makes a declaration of self that recalls the appearance of an old school report, confining in a box the irregularly spaced NAME: SUE TOMPKINS. The regulatory power of the institution, maybe—Foucault? I’m seeing the French everywhere—or a hemmed-in proclamation of self. Yet another piece is distinctly concrete, a block of thickly overtyped characters topped by IVE BEEN TAKEN OVER WILLIAM. A mental comma flickers in and out of existence, switching the sense from declaration to address. Coyly, the piece is titled IVE BEN TAKEN OVER WILLIAM, with the two competing names underscoring the air of nomination, selection, even conflict.
If you think you see a melancholy latent in my interpretation of Tompkins’s typewriter works, you’re right. Perhaps it’s fair, but it’s also no doubt partially a projection, based on my own association between bookishness and recurring battles with gloom. In aggregate the typewritten pieces are less tense and at times playful, as kissing oneself would be. Created in the year of John Wick 2, KEANUS BACK features the thrilling titular announcement—once again readable in multiple ways—on a field of flowerlike asterisks. HUSTLER features nearly a whole page of the title continuously repeated in a rectangular block set off-center, capped with a THE. The repeating S subtly pluralizes the word, producing yet another oscillation: One or many hustlers? The choice inevitably creates an air of questioning, of irresolution, even as the ringing sounds of Tompkins’s voice on Klove create a prevailing exuberance, what I hear as the exuberance possible, despite all odds, in making art.
Music/Performance
Despite her long-running art career, Sue Tompkins is probably better known as the singer for the Glaswegian rock band Life Without Buildings, who put out a single extraordinary record in 2001 titled Any Other City. The album is the form in which most of us have experienced Tompkins’s virtuosic way of performing, though for more raw versions I suggest you check out More Cola Wars (2004/2007) or this more musical gig at Los Angeles’s late lamented 356 Mission. Pay special attention to two things: the artist’s burgeoning notebook, which includes not only the words she speaks but also markings that indicate a kind of score for the piece’s tempo and delivery, and Tompkins’s stalking of the stage, the way she keeps time to an internal metronome the pacing of which is not always entirely clear.
Unsurprisingly, the brilliance of Any Other City hinges on Tompkins’s unique vocals, which skitter across a crack postpunk backdrop somewhere between the Fall and the tightest moments of Flying Nun groups like the Clean. Her lyrics, wound into tighter packages than Klove or her art performances and buoyed with youthful ups and downs, hang together on the margins of sense, twisting into odd patterns with unpredictable, inimitable stutters and repetitions. While I’d love to quote every song on the album, here’s just a bit from the beginning of “The Leanover”:
If I lose you
If I lose you
If I lose you
If I lose you
Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, mm-mmm-mmIf I
If I
If I
If I
If I
B-b-baby baby g-g-g
So g-g-g
You you
If I lose you
If I lose you
Uh-huh, uh-huhIf I lose you in the street
If I lose you in the street
If I lose you in the street at night
If I lose you in the street
If I lose, don’t be sad
I’ve reflexively transcribed Tompkins’s lyrics, with their myriad vocal tics and fillips, as I imagine they would appear on a typewritten page. Hearing them sung is very different, no less cerebral but rowdy and unexpectedly thrilling. We tend think of intense formalism as being antithetical to the romantic, such that Tompkins’s work on Any Other City would seem to be too intricate and experimental to be emotive. Yet it ends up a sheerly romantic record. The effect is alchemical. It’s one of the most alive records you’ll ever hear.
The long-disbanded Life Without Buildings is reuniting for a few gigs this November, pegged around the 50th anniversary of Rough Trade’s store in London plus one in their hometown of Glasgow. If you wanna see Tompkins in vivo, you’re going to have to hit the secondary markets, however: The shows have been all sold out for months.
Music/Basketball/Anomie
When the clock struck 0.0 on June 13 I was filled, unexpectedly, with despair. I should have seen it coming. Since I’d been back in New York after many months away, the Knicks had offered a lush and ready means of distraction from my own life and its resumption—or possible reconstitution. Maybe my life needs a Derridean reading: What possibilities would flicker into existence if I dared stare at it long enough? The Knicks’ triumph now secured, my anesthetic would be cruelly cut off.
A secondary nausea came from something I’ve learned afresh in these last weeks. The stupidest worst thing about living in New York is that whenever anything notable occurs on almost any scale, hundreds of thousands of words erupt in a glutinous gusher and coagulate over our actual experience into something ironically ingestible. There is no world outside the text, bien sur, but sometimes I get a little tired of that axiom’s current iteration, and my own implication therein. The cumulative vivacity of this output fails to meet the standards of most large-language models. You can’t beat them at their own game. As Spike Lee declared after Game 4’s miraculous comeback, the cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river. We’re the cat.
The ultimate horror of the Knicks’ victory, however, was in my case aesthetic. When they clinched, I knew that many, many citizens of this city I can’t quit would consider it fitting to celebrate by playing “Empire State of Mind.”
When Jay-Z (feat. Alicia Keys) released “Empire State of Mind” in 2009, it came as a revoltingly transparent attempt by the getting-dusty Hova to give his recording career a late shot of juice. Moreover he wanted a branded purchase on history. Sheerly financial concerns motivated the engineering of something as insipid as “All About That Bass” that could be marketed as a jingle for the city from which he had emerged with such a smooth assertion of authenticity. And somehow it took seven people to write the piece of shit, none of whom could manage to fix the nonsensical refrain.
Leaving that profound idiocy aside—and I’m no grammar cop, but it’s the writing of someone with mustard on their shirt and holes in their pockets—“Empire State of Mind” is ersatz Obama-era triumphalist prefab Let’s Remember Some Guys bullshit, a spray of namechecking diarrhea sold as a fountain of fondue as a tablepiece for weddings and other special occasions. It reeks of the stale cigar smoke of an entrepreneur who’s lost interest in making music puffing up the bounce-house mythology of a once-tough town in its soft-ass Bloomberg speculation days, an arc for which Jay-Z is the ideal emblem. It’s a garbage song that has equity only because it was endowed with capital, which investors will continue to boost to garner ad nauseum returns. Until I looked up the lyrics just now I never even noticed that the last verse is an idiotically misogynistic morality tale. And why celebrate the Knicks with Jay-Z, who served as a propaganda puppet and 0.067% partner for the Russian oligarch who brought the ignominious Nets to Brooklyn?
Truly I have been wounded by the fact that people in New York, those with whom I shared the joy of June 13, 2026, actually like this song, even if they were brainwashed into it. I’m not alone in finding “Empire State of Mind” pathetic, but it’s been embraced by a wide swath of the populace, given how often I heard it blasting from speakers, how many IGs featured it, how Alicia Keys herself mounted the stage post-parade to perform it at the behest of our heretofore perfect-angel mayor. My moment of grand human togetherness vaporized in a flash. It’s disturbing to have lived through passages of time now absorbed into history—that is, to be getting old—because you see absolute toads who in their supposed heyday were mocked by anyone with half a brain be rehabilitated because culture is an investment and you can only resist marketing for so long.
On the night of Jalen Brunson’s climactic 45-piece, I did stick my head into a cleaned-out bar that will remain unnamed because I like it (a judicious snobbery and gatekeeping are the endorsements here, if you haven’t figured it out already), where a few patrons stood truly dazed in small clutches, the two bartenders as insensate as if they had been waterboarded while “Empire State of Mind” was playing on repeat. As I tried to order a beer to go, a song came over the sound system that came out the year the Knicks were last in the finals with a serious chance to win—Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind.” The only video I could find was created by a fan. Imagine: something created solely out of love.
Wine (Premium Subscribers Only)
This week, Spigot’s wine commentary on an eccentric French red is a special treat for patrons only. You can become one too by clicking the button above.