LANDSCAPES OF RUMOURED LONELINESS

‘Sorry I’m so late, I showed up at Pipeworks instead’, my friend says as she greets me in front of The Pipe Factory. We’re here for the opening of the exhibition Don’t Believe Everything Yves Leather Tells You, curated by Ciarán Mac Domhnaill and showing work by artist Yves Leather and photographer Jack Thomson. My friend’s confusion has in a way been orchestrated by the creative trio. Their last exhibition collaboration was sponsored by the gay sauna, Pipeworks—they were hoping something like this would happen. This show, as the text next to the door promises, will centre ‘on gossip within a queer context’, gossip that more specifically ‘touches upon subjects of relationship, friendship, sex, sexuality, neurodiversity and the sale of art’.

‘Don’t Believe Everything Yves Leather Tells You’, warns the show’s title and poster. Yves Leather is the artist whose work and, it seems, life, the show revolves around. The name already flips the script of expectations when encountering an artist so devoted to their persona: their given name (as I was told), inherited from Mr. And Mrs. Leather, is already slicker than any pseudonym I could come up with.

Leather is here showing work of two very distinct factures: on the one hand, gestural paintings of desert landscapes overhung by rocky dick peaks, in frames shaped like flames of a decidedly handmade or ‘crafty’ aesthetic. On the other, ready-made objects, mostly of the inflatable variety—some of which one can recognise, scanned, screen-printed and hanging in inflatable frames. Mac Domhnaill informs us that the desert paintings were made in response to ‘a recent relationship [of the artist] with an American lover, a relationship that was fragile, easily punctured and is now standing at a point in which it needs to be “put to bed”’.

Gossip may very well be a regular attendee of art opening chatter. Here, a deliberate decision is made not to relegate it to the unacknowledged, but to instead integrate it into the main discourse. Reflections on the sincerity of the handmade flame frames, on the tenderness of the giant desert cocks, more than well-endowed but so lonely; and murmurs about whether the American lover is going to show up to the opening, have they read the exhibition text, and what do they think of it, all arise within the same discussions where all these registers of ‘art talk’ have their rightful place. In a milieu in which accusations of frivolity and superficiality are often so readily levelled at any interaction with art that strays from the consecrated (male, heterosexual and, above all, serious) model of critical engagement, reclaiming cattiness is here envisioned as a queer criticality.

On the flipside, Leather appears to be aping celebrity, seemingly expecting audiences to excitedly take private jokes as celebrity gossip. This confusion could be a conscious one, if the desperate plea ‘I am a famous artist.com’ spray-painted on an inflatable mattress is anything to go by. Yves Leather is stuck between a desert rock and a rock-hard place: between inside jokes, the language of community, and celebrity gossip, that of the art market. Tension is in the air, as there seems to be hesitation as to which group Leather is more eager to embrace and be embraced by. Coming out of the show, I am left wondering if Yves Leather is a budding famous artist, or the ‘no one important’ who has sponsored the show (‘this exhibition is sponsored by no one important’, reads the wall).

The work of photographer Jack Thomson shows Leather posing as an unconvinced artist-superstar, looking straight into the camera with sad frightful eyes. The headshots, flashily edited with chroma key composition, owe much to pop art, with a visual sensibility fit for the social media age and the stance of the artist-model affected with hesitation. A few of the photographs show Yves Leather shirtless in front of a green screen, wearing a green balaclava; in one of these the artist is taking a selfie. With the green still very much present, these images make the statement ‘I want to hide’, without actually using the green screen for its intended camouflaging purposes. Announcing that one is not to be trusted, or that one wishes to hide, is enough of a gesture to ensure they will not be taken to task. Leather camps coyness, strikes a pose of naïvety and performs plausible deniability from the title of their show down to their persona.

If you don’t feel particularly inclined to play along, you may have started asking some obvious questions: is all this gossip really at the crux of the work? Was all of it produced in a love-scorned frenzy (like Leather’s last show Inner Conflict and Gayness was supposedly motivated by an obsession with their curator)? Is any of it about any of that? Curator Ciarán Mac Domhnaill is a fabulator in his own right, but accusing him of supplanting the artist’s intent with an alternate account of events would amount to asking Yves Leather for the truth. As we’ve established, the artist—in this case Yves Leather—hardly constitutes a trustworthy source, or one of authority.

Some, perhaps even Leather themselves, may find the soap-operatic curatorial paratext to be a distraction from the art. But it may also be, in the tradition of smug fourth-wall-breaking calls for audience responsibility, a provocation not to take any authoritative statements, from artist or from curator, as an unquestionable truth and to instead look at the art. To look at the writing, as well. Mac Domhnaill’s curatorial text won’t tell you all about Yves, and it is, as much as the artwork, responsible for itself. But, placed in conversation with each other, they offer different places from which we may start to read. Lying can have many mediums and it, too, is a craft.

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Clara Raillard is a French artist and writer living in Glasgow. Her work has appeared in La Cave Poésie René-Gouzenne, Toulouse (2019), La Maison Salvan, Labège (2019), the XXIVe Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Toulouse (2021), the Poetry Club, Glasgow (2021, 2022) and the CCA, Glasgow (2022). She has recently graduated from the MLitt in Art Writing at the Glasgow School of Art. Her masters project, Evil Video, is a collection of essays which explores, through film and art criticism and dishonest life-writing, a series of entangled and difficult relationships with screens, situations where the screen looks back at the viewer-writer, or can be traversed to another side.

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Yves Leather and Jack Thomson, Don’t Believe Everything Yves Leather Tells you, curator Ciarán Mac Domhnaill, Pipe Factory, Glasgow, 13-18 July 2022