Mount Jupiter Reports

Can we make a zombie formalism gag here? Neil Clements, The Conversation, 2026.

So, the last show at Victoria Road’s vertiginous galerie du Celine closes this weekend. In a spare room of co-organiser Michael White’s Govanhill flat, four phallic tombstones in the increasingly signature treadplate of artist Neil Clements offer something like a heavy-handed  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Celine’s eleven-year history has scarred the red walls: smears of white filler hide hundreds of nail holes, cracks and pits—that’s spackle for the tenfold more North Americans now residing in G42 since Celine’s earliest days. Clements’ The Conversation is rather more one-sided than its title purports. Cartoonish memorials broadcast a big cathartic fuck it whilst a microphone suspended discretely from the ceiling promises an active listener, lurking elsewhere. The mic suggests a right of reply, but we’re not so clear on the motivations of our notional conversation partner. Is this a Vito Acconci wanking-under-the-floorboards type situation? An absurdist exercise in data collection—tell us, how did your project go? Is this mic even on? Hello, is anybody there?

Conversations which are not conversations, pretend listening, furrowed brows, nodding in empathy—Celine’s knowing last gesture materialises some of the gaslighting and shapeshifting normalised in Scotland’s artworld of 2026. Whilst you lay there kneecapped, bleeding out, dying, dead, buried, grieved, forgotten, don’t worry, we hear you!

Our pre-verbal Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Mairi McAllan MSP is perennially ‘listening’ whilst Creative Scotland offer ill-defined ‘preference’ for ‘a vibrant and viable culture future’ in the former Centre for Contemporary Arts building (The Herald, 23 Sept), yet, as the relevant lawmaker and property owner, neither would go quite so far as to use their powers for intervention. As the Save Our CCA campaign has continued to expose through FOI-ed minutes, absolute resignation to our national atrophy seems to be the idéologie du jour of public-private-pilled people occupying boardrooms. A higher ranking CS preference is for the building to be sold (landlording is harder than it used to be). Parties interested in purchasing the building now have four weeks to materialise a funded bid. The terminal and obvious contradiction of possibilities between fictional cultural futures and real cultural timelines is seemingly not worth cognition.

Meanwhile, the staff of Duncan of Jordanstone (University of Dundee) and Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh) are striking for five weeks each in resistance to the threat of compulsory redundancies and destabilising cuts across programmes. The former were £30m in the red in 2024 before a £40m government bailout; the latter claims £140m (£92m from staff ‘costs’) in savings need be found, despite there being no deficit. University management tout their ‘ongoing discussions’ (‘Squid Game,’ UCU Edinburgh) without any viable mechanism for consulting with frontline staff. Not far behind, the Glasgow School of Art’s recent solicitation of voluntary redundancies and sale of the Barnes Building—its haunted ex-children’s hospital / RAAC lawsuit in waiting—leave them to Tetris ever-more students into smaller spaces. Managers have been instructed to practice emoting concern without contrition.

The listening-learning-lumpening performance hasn’t only been limited to the managerial classes; artists can pretend to listen too. A MoJu reader tips us off about Catherine Opie’s dismissal of yet more strike activity, now the PCS members at National Galleries Scotland. Prefacing that ‘I want to be clear that I do support workers’ rights at museums,’ the American photographer (Nan Goldin’s Wario?) recuses herself from public solidarity through the far more ennobling work of being a queer celebrity:

“the hug a young trans person receives from me at one of my openings is, quite literally, something that can help them feel better in the world.” Taking away “the public’s chance to be with me feels like censorship,” and “causes harm to the public.” (‘Picket Your Battles,’ Private Eye 1683).

Absence… makes the harm grow stronger?

I hear you, says the hammer to the nail.

Shut the fuck up and pass the sertraline, thinks the nail.

___

Mount Jupiter Reports is a new monthly bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service. Do you have artworld troubles? Write to mount.jupiter.conspiracy@gmail.com with your symptoms and an exorcism may be provided.