In his text ‘IS THIS DESIRE?’, commissioned on the occasion of Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby’s exhibition Inner Heat, writer Charlie Fox riffs off their translated digital images, through a personal cosmology of PJ Harvey, pastoral ravishment, and transcendence.

IS THIS DESIRE? 

Sada (Eiko Matsuda) sucking on the edge of her knife in Ai No Corrida (1976), Bambi’s hot girlfriend Faline slinking through the lush springtime forest after the rain in Bambi (1942), Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton making out, stoned, in the bath from Performance (1970)… When I was a little kid, my mum and dad got me a copy of The Movie Book for Xmas: it was so huge, I didn’t really read it but just fell into it, like my own personal version of Wonderland’s rabbit hole. I can still remember the discombobulating feelings I got from certain pix, the illicit tingle of knowing I probably shouldn’t be looking at something and liking it. Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby’s work is giving me flashbacks. 

The collection of drawings seen in this show are trippy and enigmatic, sexy and strange. They’re all harvested from who knows where on the internet (hazy digital photographs, screenshots from phone vids, memes, diagrams) and, in this woozy dislocation from one medium to another, they’ve weathered a certain level of decay, like old Xeroxes found in a ditch.  The pathos and the weirdness of these carefully chosen images, not to mention the ways that they’re frequently combined or coupled, stimulate several sensitive areas at once, all of them very contemporary. I mean, what has sexiness turned into? Is a diagram helpful? What are your kinks? Are you just a confused animal at twilight?  

Majid and Newby painstakingly render the fried cosmos of grain from the original materials in pencil, which takes hours, an act simultaneously dirty and devotional.  Nope, wait— ‘dirty’ is wrong. It’d be easy to amplify the supposedly lurid aspects of their source images. But the vibe is more tender. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at sometimes, which is a big part of the thrill radiating from their work.  

If you want to know how the mood has altered in cultural dealings with kinkiness and erotic idiosyncrasy, haunt the show for a little while before watching Nick Broomfield’s documentary Fetishes (1996), in which the director checks out the excitements available at the luxurious club Pandora’s Box— sniffing dirty sneakers, bondage, elaborate historical role play— in a state of permanent bewildered aghast-ness like a grandmother stumbling into an orgy.  

Almost thirty years later, the whole tone is kind of ridiculous, as if Broomfield was investigating another planet. There’s a deeper, less scaredy cat recognition, of what might be going on inside people and how it might come out, combined with a lack of interest in shock, shame or exposé. Thanks, internet. Now, if you need it, it’s just out there, available, and you can find plenty of people who like the same thing. Fantasy isn’t synonymous with filth anymore. (Although, of course, filth is a thrill and always will be.) Post-Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, there’s a willing acceptance of fantasy in general. Are you tired of your human body, too? Fantasy is just something it might be fun to do for real. A squat figure stood in mud— splosher? Someone in a roadkill mask cavorting in a forest, the background aglow with lights… or maybe hungry eyes. A cute yet weary cartoon chihuahua in a space-age top gazes, bug-eyed, bat-eared, paw on hip, at who knows what. Another is seemingly more straightforward: one of Lacan’s galactic diagrams of desire gets remixed, its various planets contain terminology which isn’t drawn from his psychoanalytic glossary— ‘objet petit a’— but a lover’s discourse for the extremely online, circa 2024: ‘Girlboss’, ‘cringe’, ‘rent-free’ alongside timeless biological classics such as ‘have sex’.  

OK, it’s a cunning joke, but it’s kind of spooky, too. I’d say something about the absence of ‘ghosting’ from this playful matrix, but Majid and Newby’s images are pretty phantasmal anyway: original authors unknown, pencil endowing everything with a certain haunting precariousness of presence that might be something like the textural equivalent of pillow talk: faint, disappearing into or briefly illuminating the dark. But get closer and closer and paradoxically it can seem as if the pencil gives these hazy scenes a kind of weird and seductive fleshiness.  

Or do I mean ‘furriness’? 

One of the stars in the sequence of works known as Contact is a fuzzily rendered man in a high-grade Furry suit: he’s being a collie. You could be hanging out in the California redwoods getting stoned with Lassie, if Lassie had a mullet. This deadpan image is sweetly twinned with another drawing of a woodland chill-out scene: ‘I am extremely blessed and incredibly grateful.’ Maybe the subtitle is just relaying his thoughts. He looks serene, regal, such a good boy.   

The sexiness of nature and the possibilities of pastoral ravishment are very old subjects for art, maybe the oldest ones. Think about Adam and Eve smooching in Eden while the snake watched and hissed with glee. Or  consider Titian painting the stuff of any self-respecting Furry’s dreams during his long and fruitful infatuation with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Maybe you wanna be a stag mutilated by hounds for spying on your beloved with her bow and arrow at the water’s edge. Maybe you just wanna be Jupiter and piss on Danäe. From the sky to her bed. Meanwhile, Channel 4’s late night classic documentary Dogging Tales (2012) has explored the strange and strangely affecting world of woodland sex. Along with the frequent use of sylvan settings in Majid and Newby’s works, the presence of benches take us even further outside. Are we in a good cruising spot? Somewhere to get high? Or just a nice place to contemplate nature? I spent a lot of time thinking about Étant Donnes (1946-1966) by Marcel Duchamp: the sly old faun’s installation that he created in secret, a peephole from the wall to the woods from Twin Peaks. I mean, it’s there, shivering: the nude lying in the undergrowth, mysterious trees, the lush hyperreal confusion between painting and photography, or photography and drawing. It all glitters shroomily, and I’m back staring at Majid and Newby’s glowing radioactive stag reminds me of a meme that I saw celebrating Bambi’s dad as a heroic example of ‘a stoic hottie’.  

Hotness is also explored in Majid and Newby’s video Inner Heat; a million-likes Reel taken from somebody’s Instagram account of a power line exploding in an American suburb. Filmed again and again on Hi8 it gets more and more psychedelic: a sudden explosion of freak weather, green to pink to purple, greenery replaced by sci-fi snow, sky all sparkle. And there are the encoded erotic possibilities: pyrophilia, amazing orgasm, the lightning flash of love at first sight. ‘Send this’, as another one of Majid and Newby’s pictures instructs— anonymous text overlaying a bunch of radiant hearts— ‘to the most beautiful person in the universe.’  

And if you did, maybe they would feel extremely blessed and incredibly grateful.  

But then again, your tongue can get stuck on the roof of your mouth. You might get unsettled by the stag. The landscape of six pictures seen in Contact (Forum) begins with the weary chihuahua lady and ends with a cackling gumball that reflects our own angst and fear of humiliation back at us: ‘You are too invested in the wider spectacle/To act on your desire!’  

Well, answer the gumball with a riddle. I probably should fade out with something sassy/horny I saw on my Instagram Explore page or whatever but I just like that this song makes me shiver.   

 ‘Is This Desire?’ is the title track for the 1998 album by PJ Harvey. The trippy thing is that when she sings those words, the question is… unfinished. Not ‘is this desire?’ or is it confusion, regret, comedown, but, once she cracks it open, ‘is this desire… enough to lift us higher?’  

There’s always that craving for transcendence, the ache of needing to get deeper into the body in order to get out of it.  

I don’t know.  

It’s not the kind of question you’re supposed to answer; it’s a mysterious halo of possibilities, shape-shifting, wild, magical. Touch the light, feel the goosebumps flourish on your skin.  

BIOGRAPHY

Charlie Fox is a writer and artist who lives in London. His work has appeared in Dazed, The New York Times, 032c, and The Paris Review. Flowers of Romance, the group show he’s curated for Lodovico Corsini in Belgium, will run until 21st December.

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