Purity & Danger

A scandal breaks as two Hollywood veterans are scooped up from the cutting room floor. Sylvie and Dora clutch their pearls at Kenneth Anger’s spurious history of cinema’s Golden Age and Anita Loos’ blonde-bashing memoir of industrious coquettedom, stopping along the way to discuss the loveable scamp, the tactical bob and the ethics of excess.

Donald Barthelme’s incontinent colossal father and Giulio Romano’s tempestuous sons of Gaia both crash to earth in narratives of giant vanquishing. Sylvie and Dora explore giants in their various guises — the bellicose, the libidinous, the grotesque, the innocent and the divine — and defend the honour of each.

Slavic Art Deco superstar Tamara de Lempicka and her pioneering automobile-self-portrait collides with Crash, J. G. Ballard’s lurid tale of symphorophiliac entanglement. Sylvie and Dora travel through the crepuscular netherworld of pornography, down the straight line that is the badge of man, towards the future.

Oskar Kokoschka’s swan-skin effigy of Austria’s most assiduous heartthrob, Alma Mahler, meets hoity toity foil, Cynthia, a mannequin-socialite brought to life by window-dresser Lester Gaba.

Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli suckles at the Capitoline Wolf’s imperial teat. Sylvie and Dora discuss feral children and their symbolic environs.

Nuremberg’s non-verbal wunderkind meets Paul Auster’s monomaniacal sleuth in a warm embrace of developmental abnormality. Sylvie and Dora ask, is language innate?

A style war has broken out in the imaginary sex county! Jilly Cooper’s 'Rutshire Chronicles' and Peter York and Ann Barr’s 'Sloane Ranger Handbook' undress the stylistic arsenal of the British class system.

Acts of God, subjectivity under duress, and the interminable negotiation between nature and civility; what can Edwin Landseer's haunted painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes' and Ruben Östlund's 'Force Majeure' teach us about the human condition?

The Fabergé Egg faces off with Piet Hein's Superegg. Their curvaceous confrontation invites us to reflect on cultural production, empire and divination.