In the opening frames of Nigel Dick’s video for Guns N’ Roses Welcome to the Jungle (1987) singer Axl Rose adopts the guise of a fresh-faced hayseed disembarking a Greyhound in Los Angeles. So beautiful, so androgynous is Rose, it’s tempting to imagine what might follow had the film been made 30 years later by a band of less testicular focus. This being a Guns N’ Roses video, we instead watch L.A. turn this child into a MAN: native of an urban jungle that will, he tells us, ‘bring you to your shannananananananan knees’.
Rose’s screeched, stuttering ‘shannananananananan’ appears scrawled like a prayer onto the surface of a pool float cast in resin in Andra Ursuţa’s Vanilla Isis. Like many works in the show, the float has received a doomy makeover in the style of the Black Standard of Islamic State, putting a morbid, religious spin on Rose’s prediction that this masculine environment will ‘bring you to your knees’.
Ursuţa has no time for current pieties, for liberal earnestness, for twitchy puritanical policing of the cultural sphere. Vanilla Isis swirls with piss-takes, sexual innuendo, brash references, contradiction and fury. Like its titular pun, the show is an extended exercise in bisociation. Jamming together diverse references—Guns N’ Roses, Kazimir Malevich, health cults, 1980s pop culture memes, Black Flag, body building, Richard Serra, The Sex Pistols, political radicalisation—Ursuţa traces an underlying theme in the tribal entrancement of young men.