In order to manage my expectations early, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad—better known collectively as the White Pube—make it crystal clear to me: they do not like Tracey Emin. We’ve barely stepped into the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey before they confess that the prospect of walking around a showing of her latest work was nearly enough to put them off meeting me. “But then we thought, go on then, it’ll be a laugh!” says de la Puente.
The exhibition is made up mostly of large figurative paintings, all in the same vaguely menstrual blend of reds and purples. I stand with Muhammad in front of one large canvas depicting a woman lying on a bed with her cat.
“That looks like red cabbage to me,” Muhammad says, pointing to the purple sworls of what we both guess is either the headboard or a pillowcase.
A few minutes later de la Puente joins us. “Don’t you think that looks like cabbage?” she says.
“Yes!” says Muhammad.
Tongue-in-cheek namesake aside, this is actually the first time the White Pube have set foot in the White Cube. Since they started publishing their writing together in 2015 as students at Central Saint Martins—and have since grown their empire to include a podcast, artist grants and a resource library for arts funding—they have sought to carve out an alternative kind of space for cultural criticism. They generally don’t write about big institutional shows or famous artists. “If it feels like a stone in my shoe,” explains Muhammad, “like I’ve got to take my shoe off and fish around for it and pull it out, that’s the text. It has to grip the gears of my system somehow.”
“I’m so grateful that we don’t have editors giving us missions or sending us out to see things,” says de la Puente. “I feel like I would turn up and be like, ‘Oh God, I’m being forced to have a reaction and it’s not coming!’” (I quietly hope this is not a subtle dig at our Emin expedition.)
Digressions are frequent, sometimes even critical; talk about art leads to talk about books or gigs or other things
This instinctual approach doesn’t always lead them to write about art or the “best new thing”; de la Puente tells me that the most-read pieces on their website are reviews of the television show Gilmore Girls and the restaurant chain Dishoom. (I discover only later that de la Puente has also recently “reviewed” a trip to her dentist.) Though regardless of whether it’s video games, film, television, art or… dentistry, a White Pube take is immediately recognisable. They often won’t just write about the work in question, but also about what’s going on in their lives at the time. Digressions are frequent, sometimes even critical; talk about art leads to talk about books or gigs or other things. It’s not so much gonzo as an attempt to break down the false, disembodied objectivity that shrouds much mainstream art criticism. The White Pube want you to be a co-conspirator in their experience rather than an audience member to their lecture. We can’t look at art without our bodies and moods and lives. Why pretend otherwise?
In the early days, the White Pube published a lot of short reviews on social media, particularly Instagram—and their criticism wasn’t exactly welcome. “People were really pissed off when we started writing things,” says de la Puente, alluding to an incident in 2016 when they were met with a huge backlash after lampooning one artist for putting KFC buckets in a gallery as an installation piece. “There was a feeling of Instagram being a kind of marketing tool for artists, or a proxy portfolio,” Muhammad adds. “The environment was other artists being very supportive or kind. Critique didn’t come into it.”
Nowadays, art criticism on social media might be more commonplace, but so too is the pressure artists feel to be simultaneously marketeers and influencers. “I see artists I know spending money on expensive cameras and tripods and ring lights and scheduling tools to put Instagram posts out and I think, you should be making art! What are you doing?!” de la Puente says.
Yet, because they also made a name for themselves on social media, the White Pube understand the opportunities it brings compared to the traditional strictures of the art world. “You have to feed the beast,” says de la Puente.
It’s perhaps partly due to this ambivalence that the White Pube have been seeking new ways to approach their criticism. “The past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about criticism as fiction or storytelling,” Muhammad says, “the ways of sneaking your thoughts in through a story.” One outcome of that thinking was the White Pube’s first book, Poor Artists (published in October), which follows the artist Quest Talukdar as she feels her way through an industry that is endlessly tantalising but hopelessly opaque. For anyone who has tried to carve out a space for themselves in the art world—or knows anyone who’s tried—Quest’s experiences will feel very familiar: “I hated it. But I loved the experience that contained such hate. Discovering something new was giving me a thrill for being alive in a body, all meat and bones, with these opinions bursting out of me.”
In case the more surreal elements of Poor Artists fail to give the game away—such as one scene in which a posh former art student called Royal Tunbridge Wills suddenly explodes into a bloody, meaty heap during his own vernissage—this is, more or less, a novel. But while Quest isn’t a real person, she isn’t a complete work of fiction either; her interactions and observations are based on real interviews de la Puente and Muhammad conducted with people in and around the art world. (Quest’s name also hints at her real-world creators: “Q” is the middle letter between G and Z.)
Due to various non-disclosure agreements, the White Pube are unable to tell me whom exactly they interviewed for Poor Artists, only that they include curators and “some” renowned artists. The best I can get out of them is that one person they definitely didn’t interview was Damien Hirst. (I’ll hazard a guess and say Emin is another.) Suffice it to say, and despite its reputation as a place full of egos, many people in the art world seemed to be more than happy to become anonymous “material in a collage” (as Muhammad puts it) if it meant they could speak their minds.
Very level one: Tracey Emin’s new work on show at White Cube. Image: Peter Nicholls / Getty Images
“A lot of artists would like their public image to be as an artist and not necessarily as a person who isn’t a fan of the industry they’re a part of,” de la Puente says. She makes the point that most artists would be putting their careers at risk if they criticised too harshly the institutions they depend upon for their livelihood.
Fortunately for us, this isn’t a problem for the White Pube. Back at the White Cube, Muhammad mockingly poses for a photo in front of one Emin painting in a way that has become ubiquitous, particularly among the Instagram accounts of more “polished” artists: standing off to the left-hand side of the painting, back to the camera with arms folded in an ever-so-demonstrative display of absorption.
“You know, I think one of the reasons she’s back in now is that whole 1990s, indie sleaze thing,” she says.
“You see students doing this kind of thing in art school, when they’re trying to figure out who they are,” de la Puente says. “And they feel this one thing about them is the most important thing.” She sighs. “It all just feels very level one to me. Like, yes, we know—people have periods!”
As we leave the gallery, de la Puente and Muhammad talk about possibly finding a Chilean café somewhere; de la Puente has been thinking a lot about her ancestry lately, and perhaps a café would be a good excuse to practise her Spanish. Maybe she’ll even review it. Who knows? The White Pube have shown that art criticism is at its most fun when it’s as unpredictable and leftfield as the art it critiques. Just don’t hold your breath for a glowing review of Tracey Emin any time soon.
