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

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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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