The White Pube: “Artists are skint, knackered and sharing the same 20 quid”

This Q+A was first fea­tured in Huck’s cul­ture newslet­ter. Sign up to the mail­ing list here to make sure it always lands in your inbox before any­one else sees it each month.

As the com­bined forces of a work­ing-class scouser (Gabrielle de la Puente) and a South Asian Lon­don­er, (Zari­na Muham­mad), The White Pube have always seen them­selves as out­siders in the world of art. It’s an indus­try that’s famous­ly fussy, dif­fi­cult to access, and deeply unequal – where huge amounts of mon­ey are exchanged among the hands of very few, at the very top. And yes, their name is a play on the extrav­a­gant­ly stripped back inter­na­tion­al gallery The White Cube.

But being out­siders has been their super­pow­er since the very start, when in 2015 the pair first start­ed pub­lish­ing short-form exhi­bi­tion reviews via their blog that chal­lenged and demys­ti­fied revered insti­tu­tions, all while typed out in inter­net abbre­vi­a­tions and slang. It’s what has made them so relat­able to a younger, less well-off gen­er­a­tion of artists and art fans, and has tak­en them from being online art rebels to ulti­mate­ly two of the most dis­tinc­tive and impor­tant voic­es in art media today.

Their first book, Poor Artists, is a work of part-fic­tion, part-jour­nal­ism, in a dis­tinct style of sto­ry­telling that Zari­na and Gabrielle have made their own over the past few years. It cen­tres around Quest Taluk­dar – a char­ac­ter who is some­thing of an amal­ga­ma­tion of Gabrielle and Zari­na – from birth, as she attempts to take on the indus­try, via art school and exploita­tive gal­lerists, while inter­spersed with real inter­views that Gabrielle and Zari­na con­duct­ed dur­ing the book’s writ­ing process.

It’s a sur­re­al yet gut punch­ing insight into the often fog­gy world of art, and to hear more I caught up with Gabrielle to chat about the pair’s jour­ney, play­ing the game that they hate, and why anar­chism might be the solu­tion to all of art’s (and the wider world’s) problems.

Your first inter­view was actu­al­ly with Huck right?

That’s nuts. It’s so weird, it was back in 2016 at a time when it was like: ​“Why would any­one inter­view us?” We were less than a year into pub­lish­ing 300-word reviews on the White Pube web­site, and I think we had 700 fol­low­ers. We start­ed the web­site because we thought it would be fun­ny, and that we could do a bet­ter job of writ­ing about art [than tra­di­tion­al crit­ics], and we got into a rou­tine of writ­ing one review every Sun­day. Zari­na and I would take turns and that was the law – we could not break the rou­tine. If you were on hol­i­day you were writ­ing it on your phone and would send it to the oth­er per­son to pub­lish it. I under­line that because some­times I think that’s the only rea­son we’re still here. The way to be a writer is to just write, and if you keep on writ­ing then you con­tin­ue being a writer.

How did the idea for the book come about?

We orig­i­nal­ly start­ed oth­er jobs and were doing The White Pube for the love of it. Then dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, this thing hap­pened where a lot of peo­ple who had been mean­ing to become Patre­on sup­port­ers for a while final­ly had five min­utes to fig­ure out what the fuck Patre­on was and became sub­scribers. So then we sud­den­ly had enough mon­ey to pay rent, which was strange, and then start­ed putting way more effort into our writ­ing. So at the end of 2020, we had an idea where we were like: ​“You know what? We’ve had so many inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions with artists over the years – gos­sip, sol­i­dar­i­ty and strate­gies – maybe we can put that in a book so it’s not just kept between us two.” Then in Jan­u­ary 2021 I got sick with long covid and was out for a year-and-a-half. We didn’t pick things back up until 2022.

Of course a lot of the book explores the impor­tance of mon­ey in art – how much of that is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal? And when it came to sud­den­ly hav­ing mon­ey, how could you see that you were able to cre­ate and pro­duce things in a new way?

Things are dif­fer­ent now – in 2020 I moved out into a flat on my own and was com­fort­able, but that’s not the truth any­more. But for a while, what mon­ey bought us was focus and the abil­i­ty to enjoy ​“obliv­ion”, as the Valen­tine char­ac­ter in Poor Artists says, where I’ve tak­en myself away from every­thing so that I can just be an artist and it can just be me and the art. It was actu­al­ly the year I think that the qual­i­ty of our writ­ing jumped up the most as a result of hav­ing no dis­trac­tions, because it was all I did – it was amaz­ing. In a way it felt like a year of what life’s sup­posed to be like, because I get to do what I want to do. I’m sure every­one who has an artis­tic prac­tice vies for the same thing.

I remem­ber the day I had an idea for some­thing called The Suc­cess­ful Fund­ing Appli­ca­tion Library – I want­ed to make a page on the web­site where we just put loads of exam­ples and pdfs of peo­ple who got fund­ing, res­i­den­cies etc., and I didn’t get up from my lap­top for four hours. That expe­ri­ence was hap­pen­ing so often, and it was real­ly ful­fill­ing because you could have the idea and exe­cute it in all the same breath. I want that for me now and for oth­ers, but the eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion that we’re in dis­rupts cre­ative flow, which then dis­rupts your men­tal health and sense of self. You start ask­ing: ​“Where the fuck am I gonna go with my life? Am I even an artist if I don’t get to do this that much anymore?”

I feel like as inequal­i­ty has grown in the world, peo­ple are under­stand­ing the lim­its of mer­i­toc­ra­cy. But art is one of those prac­tices where suc­cess­ful peo­ple have his­tor­i­cal­ly been revered and held up as hav­ing God-gift­ed tal­ents that tran­scend their con­di­tions. Why was it impor­tant to chal­lenge that in your book and demys­ti­fy the art industry?

There’s a com­ment in the book about an artist called Maria And­wan­der, who took Flash Art Mag­a­zine – which says on the cov­er ​“The Lead­ing Euro­pean Art Mag­a­zine” – and she made an art­work where she used a chem­i­cal and a q‑tip to erase the words inside the mag­a­zine metic­u­lous­ly. So it would just be white pages and white pages – I think about that all the time, because from the per­spec­tive of a crit­ic it is ridicu­lous that I have the pow­er to say who is and who is not wor­thy. I hate that. I think about all the artists in the mag­a­zine who feel impor­tant because they’re in it, and the much greater num­ber of peo­ple whose names will nev­er grace those covers.

It’s some­thing that’s been on my mind a lot because we’re try­ing to pub­li­cise this book – we’re speak­ing to Huck Mag­a­zine, The Guardian, who­ev­er, and I’m grate­ful because I want to sell the book and have enough mon­ey for a deposit on a house, so I’ve got to play the game. All artists do, but at the same time I wish we were in a world where we didn’t need to bow to those pow­ers. A world where mon­ey didn’t exist, where we could give the books away for free. And it wasn’t a case of who is in the mag­a­zine because everyone’s in the mag­a­zine and no one per­son is the edi­tor. Poor Artists became about not try­ing to fix the world we’re in now, but try­ing to design anoth­er plan­et we can escape to.

There’s quite a lot of sur­re­al­ism in the book – how much is a play on the crazy nature of the art world, and every­thing sur­round­ing it?

I think it’s the equiv­a­lent of when some­one stands behind you and knocks their knees into yours – if some­one is total­ly desta­bilised, maybe they can start to think about the sta­bil­i­ty they want to get. We’re try­ing to get read­ers into this real­ly loose state in which to imag­ine a bet­ter art world. It’s an easy treat­ment to apply to the UK art scene, which is full of mid­dle aged women in asym­met­ri­cal skirts and giant ear­rings, and men who feel like they are try­ing to break your hand when they shake it. Mean­while artists are knack­ered, skint and shar­ing the same 20 quid. It’s become a car­i­ca­ture of itself and the only way to con­front it is by throw­ing equal­ly men­tal car­i­ca­tures at it. If we turn the peo­ple run­ning pay-to-play exhi­bi­tion schemes into zom­bies and the world’s most pow­er­ful cura­tor into the art king, maybe as under­lings we’ll start to take it all less seri­ous­ly, and then they’ll lose pow­er over us.

With it seem­ing like bad guys are win­ning more, what do you think the future is for the art indus­try and for poor artists?

I think peo­ple will leave, and I think more peo­ple will reject these struc­tures that every­one is expect­ed to go through. Like get­ting your­self into £50,000 worth of debt to go to uni­ver­si­ty, then even more to afford a stu­dio. Then shmooz­ing peo­ple and doing what cura­tors tell you to do to get one show every five years. I think more peo­ple will retreat to make art on their own terms, and I think peo­ple will retreat and make art in com­mu­ni­ty with each oth­er, and I think that’s enough. Over the course of writ­ing the book, we did a lot of inter­views and anar­chism kept com­ing up as a way through all of this. Anar­chism, not as a new con­cept, but a very old one – I couldn’t believe that when research­ing for the book, I found out that dur­ing the Paris Com­mune there was a fed­er­a­tion of artists who made a space that was wel­come to every­one who want­ed to cre­ate art. It wasn’t any­thing to do with qual­i­ty, but just moti­va­tion and desire. For that to seem rev­o­lu­tion­ary is so sad, because that hap­pened so long ago. I always used to see pro­gres­sion as lin­ear, and it makes me feel so cheat­ed that things were the oth­er way round.

Poor Artists by The White Pube is pub­lished by Pen­guin.

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