Installation view of Dot Alma’s Our Father (Figure) Who Art in Heaven (The Nightclub), 2026, mixed media (all photos by author)
The most remarkable, equally elegiac and absurd, profound and berserk inclusion in Somerset House’s Holy Pop!, an exhibition dedicated to extreme acts of fanatical devotion to filth elders, was not Dot Alma’s bedazzled “Freedom” pew and kneeler, set in front of an altar to the Holy Father (Figure) George Michael and Hampstead Heath hookup trees, a worshipful place to pray to a pink flamingo, aviator sunglasses, tiny CCTV cameras and urinals, and a dust pan emblazoned with the singer’s face (for careless wispies?). It’s not Emma Hart’s cabinet stuffed with her decades-in-the-making Prince collection: Prince coffee mugs, Prince concert tickets, Prince books, Prince photos, a mini-Prince bust gewgaw, and, my favorite, a hastily glazed purple ceramic ashtray carved with “Let’s go crazy!” (seems like Hart already has!). It’s not Liz West’s compendium of pre-teen psychosis, a mélange of Spice Girls merch. West not only kept the basics, like a Spice World VHS, but also old bits of Spice Girls-branded garbage, such as old sticky soda cans, those coveted 7th grade suckers, Chuba Chups, and packets of whatever the hell Monster Munch was (Girl Power was apparently pickled onion flavored. Yuck!). Heck, it’s not even MY filth elder, the Dirty Three and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis’s consecrated and masticated piece of Nina Simone’s chewing gum, which Ellis preserved in the Shroud of Turin-like towel, on which Simone unceremoniously squashed the spent wad before her transformational and defiant 1999 performance at the Nick Cave-curated Meltdown Festival.
The piece I keep thinking about, long after I left the parched land of London, is a modest Yellow Submarine cookie jar, a memento from The Beatles’ trippy animated movie of the same title. As opposed to the other hoards on view, this cookie jar was unassuming, easily missed even, especially when juxtaposed with the uncontrollable neon glare radiating off of Connor Coulston’s maximalist vase tribute to Britney Spears and her iconic python-taming VMA performance of “I’m a Slave 4 U,” which beckoned like a tempting serpent-coiled relic from an aughts Garden of Eden. Yet, the cookie jar’s simplicity belied its outsized meaning: this humble Yellow Submarine was used by artist Dandy Day as a temporary urn for her Beatles maniac mother’s ashes (her ashes have now been scattered at sea (of green!)). When I read this account on the wall label, I gasped. Not because a Yellow Submarine cookie jar rivals a Big Lebowski Ralphs can in funereal flippancy, but because Day’s decision transformed what is otherwise a cutesy bit of boomer kitsch into a loving tribute to her mother’s memory and car rides listening to the Fab Four. Granted, my response could be because I also grew up anachronistically watching Yellow Submarine over and over again with my cousins, laughing at the Blue Meanies and pretending to be Ringo. But spending eternity in a yellow submarine sounds appealing, especially when the song itself illustrates a perfect afterlife: sailing into the sun with all your friends and living a life of ease with all you need. How different is it from the hereafter bar described in Talking Heads’ “Heaven”? In fact, Day’s Mum’s urn made me consider what cast-aside piece of memorabilia would be appropriate for MY ashes. My Lana Del Rey and Susan Atkins boxes made by Susanna Vico Valero may be too small, so split me between both. Or how about siphoning me into a disco ball, or, one better, a comically morose black-and-white Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds beach ball?!
Dandy Day, Mum’s urn, 2019, ceramic yellow submarine cookie jar
I realize brainstorming about my final resting place being a branded pool toy is both morbid and ridiculous. But the ability to hold both silliness and poignancy, reverence and irreverence, is the winning combination that lied at the heart of Holy Pop!, which was the best exhibition I saw during my time in London (Should I review the worst?). Of course, I would think so. I also curated an exhibition, 2019’s Idol Worship at Smack Mellon, that celebrated the oft-dismissed act of role model worship as more than a confused, hormone-ravaged teenage preoccupation with papering bedroom walls with heroes. Instead, filth elder fanaticism is an essential survival tactic! I come by this understanding honestly. In fact, perhaps it’s just self-justification! The only reason I was IN London was as a pitstop on my pilgrimage to see Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds play their sorta-homecoming show at seaside trash mecca Brighton, and to figure out once and for all what drew Nick to England’s gay Coney Island for so long. After visiting, I get it! It’s got everything: wonderful kitsch stores (Blackout Shop!); bars with squawking macaws; a garish pier filled with dark rides, arcade games, and a Helter Skelter; and a pretty pebble beach. I’m ready to move asap! Unlike many of the artists in Holy Pop!, though, I don’t have THAT big of a Cave collection. Sure, I own books (at least four signed), a hat, shirts, a new hard-won poster from Brighton, gold-framed postcards from Nick’s manaically collaging Gothic art Berlin period, a coloring book by Nick that includes at least two illustrations of toilet paper rolls, a Polaroid of a deflated Spongebob balloon tangled on a lamp post with the caption “Carnage,” random VIP lanyards leftover from panic-bought too-expensive tickets…ok, maybe I DO have more Cave crap than I thought, despite their merch being perpetually either irritatingly low effort or downright befuddling (A Bad Seeds beach ball?). But hey, I’m paring it down, unintentionally, since I tossed off my “Wild God” hoodie, obtained during the last overseas Bad Seeds pilgrimage, somewhere in Brighton. I’m considering it as an offering.
This is all to say, I get it. There is value in our overheated fervency. And Holy Pop! argued not just for its emotional worth, both individually and collectively, but for the material significance of the shrines, reliquaries, and altars erected by the monomaniacally consumed. Curated by Tory Turk, the exhibition combined personal shrines constructed by unspooled fanatics (i.e. Emma Hart’s Prince cabinet); artistic responses to unraveling devotion, like Athen and Nina’s joyful ode to girlhood featuring Marilyn Monroe and Sex and the City VHS tapes topped with statues of Shiva Nataraja (all votive objects), anchored on an enlarged sticker of a Bollywood star; and works by artists that straddle the two, like delightfully Dolly Parton-crazed Alice Hawkins. Hawkins not only showed off her gathering of Dolly dolls, photos with the wasp-waisted, big-haired Tennessee icon, fake nails, a ring she bestowed upon Dolly like a friendship bracelet, and a book emblazoned with “Dolly Parton is my religion,” but she also screened a series of videos performing as her own iteration of Parton, including while pregnant with twins, a kind of cannibalization and internalization of the object of her (and our) affection.
Alice Hawkins, I will always love you, 2001-2026
Holy Pop!’s grouping of the real and the reflection on fandom allows for fascinating pairings. Take the tree branch that cracked off of T. Rex’s cosmic dancer Marc Bolan’s shrine at the location of his fatal car wreck. Affixed with a photo of the glam rock dandy idol and a well-worn fan letter, this fallen branch was preserved by the shrine’s caretaker Fee Warner, who, as the label notes, initially traveled to Bolan’s death site to ghoulishly gather bits of his shattered windshield. Next to Bolan’s branch at Somerset House sat Graham Dolphin’s meticulous reconstruction of the lipstick-stained and graffiti-scrawled bust of Jim Morrison, which previously sat on his Père Lachaise grave until its disappearance in 1988. That was back when a cemetery visitor, traveling to conduct an American Prayer séance (Awake!), could get close to Jim’s grave without high-hurdling a metal barricade, a gymnastic-like effort I was too much of a pussy to attempt in 2024. Taken together, both Dolphin and the saved Bolan branch ask: What happens to the layers upon layers of heartfelt, teary tributes once they’ve dropped off or been swiped by yet another loony? What does it mean once they’re gone?
Graham Dolphin, Jim Morrison, 1987, 2010
Like both Jim and Marc, a surprising amount of the exhibition considered the seemingly universal impulse to pay hysterical homage at gravesites, memorials, and death anniversary gatherings, locales and events that maintain a star’s aura long after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. While some imagery was a touch too obvious, like Peter Turnley’s requisite photograph of Princess Diana’s staggeringly huge flower-filled memorial at Kensington Palace, most captured the frequently tacky but always sincerely felt enactments of grief for a lost icon, like a photograph of two people in folding chairs sitting behind a somber tableau of two commemorative Elvis plates, candles spelling out “LOVE,” and a framed illustration of the King praying at Jesus’s feet (it better be on velvet). An exquisite memorial to bad taste and blue eyes crying in the rain. This sublime image was part of Hayley Louisa Brown’s cross of photographs at a Graceland event for the anniversary of Elvis’s death, joining a baby in a King onesie and a be-ringed hand grasping a candle. All that was missing was a touch of Elvis gospel. There’s no question in my mind that those portrayed in Brown’s photographs are true Elvis lunatics, but pilgrimages made by people who aren’t completely clear as to why they’re doing it can be just as intriguing, like this endlessly endearing Yinzer couple who filmed a YouTube video at Warhol’s grave while also boasting about a Steelers victory (and also introduced a London audience to the Pittsburgh accent).
Granted, not all of Holy Pop!’s expansive scope worked. There were a few head-scratchers here, primarily Molly Soda’s photo and magnet-covered refrigerator and TOX’s Tools of the Trade, a collection of bolt cutters, hammers, spray paint, and other necessary gear for his graffiti writing. What do either of these have to do with role models? Beats me! A better inclusion may have been a graffiti writer’s black book, covered with the art of their inspirations and colleagues. But these are minor quibbles.
A particularly shitty shot of Hayley Louisa Brown’s Children of Graceland: Revisited (sorry)
Ultimately, Holy Pop! successfully posed how pop culture has become a stand-in for religion, and its shrines should be approached with the same art historical gravity as all that Medieval tat I particularly love. While it might be easy to bristle at the thought of equating fandom with religion, hey—at least it’s not politics, that other secular spirituality! And Holy Pop! showed how apt these comparisons are—and not just the overt ones, like the astonishing temple constructed for Tamil actor Rajinikanth. What is the best part of religion other than the construction of community around a higher power than yourself? Who cares if that higher power is George Michael and that community is the “weirdos that fuck in the woods,” as heralded in Dot Alma’s Our Father (Figure) Who Art In Heaven?
Yes, I also understand that no matter how much I, Tory Turk, or John Waters, for that matter, in his book Role Models, argue for the importance of role model adoration, it is hard to take seriously. It’s too sincere. It’s kind of embarrassing! I mean, a memorial to George Michael or Dobby the elf? A shrine to the Spice Girls?! Going 3,000+ miles to see the Bad Seeds for the umpteenth time?! Turk, in The Guardian, explained that she wanted to “disrupt the narrative that the collector and the fan are crazy people.” But I don’t think that’s necessary. Embrace the lunacy! It’s not as if religion is any less nuts than shoving your mum’s ashes in a Yellow Submarine cookie jar or contemplating Nina Simone’s gnawed, grey, nearly thirty-year-old gum illuminated on a plinth in a darkened room. The latter of which I did while at Somerset House on the recommendation of Ellis’s wall label. And, you know, after awhile, I was moved. It was not the first time I had gazed upon the gum’s glory—the first being in Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition—but on another viewing, particularly in the chapel-like atmosphere in Holy Pop!, I was struck not only by the teeth marks imprinted by the High Priestess of Soul, a true filth elder who told Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. upon meeting him, “I’m not nonviolent” (to which he responded, “That’s okay, sister. You don’t have to be”), but by Warren’s—and everyone else involved in its preservation, so wonderfully documented in his book Nina Simone’s Gum—fierce dedication to its protection. He did it for us. For the world. As Ellis writes in his book, “The gum wasn’t mine. Somehow it was the world’s to share.” Absurd, yes. But if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.