Rave Day in Sheffield this coming Sunday

In conjunction with the E-Vapor-8 exhibition at the Site Gallery in Sheffield I posted about recently, there is a Rave Day seminar this coming Sunday:

Talking Art and Rave
Sunday 3 August, 2 - 6pm

Join us for a Sunday afternoon exploring the legacy of 90s rave culture and its influence on artists today. The event will be led by E-Vapor-8 curator, Francesca Gavin, and you’ll hear from five artists in the exhibition along with guest speakers including a DJ, music critic and researcher of underground rave communities. We’ll also be screening their selection of music videos and playing vinyl records from the time.
The event is open to everyone and will be particularly interesting for artists, art and music lovers, researchers, former-ravers as well as bloggers and journalists.

Who is involved?
Francesca Gavin, exhibition Curator and Chair of the event. will give insight into how she curated the exhibition and discovered a fascination with rave culture and happy hardcore young British and American artists.
E-Vapor-8 artists, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Harry Burden, Lucy Stokton and Rhys Coren. Whether they actively participated or were indirectly influenced by rave, these artists explore ideas such as technology, collectivity, rebellion and psychedelia in their work.
Guest speakers include:
Winston Hazel, DJ and producer. As a true originator, Winston Hazel helped gift house music to the city of Sheffield in the mid-80s, organising parties combining new American dance sounds with funk, jazz and soul. Sharing some records and speaking from his individual perspective on the rave and dance scene, he will explore ideas of experimentation, shared positive mindset and rhythms which transformed peoples lives.
Alice O’Grady, Professor in Applied Performance at University of Leeds. Alice will talk about her 
own experience of rave, that began in the early 90s and included warehouses, beaches, festivals and more. She will examine the impacts that rave and DIY culture had on public policy and how it inspired other social movements.
When: Sunday 3 August, 2pm – 6pm, followed by drinks at Site Gallery
Where: Showroom Cinema, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX
Tickets: £5.00 / £4.00 concessions
Booking highly recommended

cooked food, love it to the bone

Lucky Spin Crew on Don FM, August 7th, 1993 - MC OC and...  DJ Stevie A ?

 

E-Vapor-8

Nathan Jones writes about the rave-inspired-art exhibition E-Vapor-8, showing at the Site Gallery in Sheffield until August 17th.


From the exhibition blurb:

"E-Vapor-8 is a group exhibition, curated by writer, editor and curator Francesca Gavin, looking at the influence and relationship between contemporary art and rave music from the early 1990s. It traces a fascination with rave culture and happy hardcore by young British and American artists, many of whom are absorbing and re-appropriating a cultural moment they were too young to participate in. The exhibition, named after a 1992 single by the band Altern 8, touches on how the hedonism and cultural upheaval of rave has passed. Ideas around intellectual and physical freedom, rebellion and myth-making are all at play.

"Participating artists are: Fatima Al Qadiri and Sophia Al-Maria, Harry Burden, Rhys Coren, Petra Cortright, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Alexandra Gorczynski, Marisa Olson, Hannah Perry, Christian J. Petersen, Travess Smalley, Lucy Stokton, and Daniel Swan.

Jones picks up on the "passed" theme:

"It features a series of haunted works opening onto the “death of rave” -- and what that death means, when it happened, and if it is still happening, are the most interesting questions provoked by a visit. 

"The notion of cultural 'Afterlife' enters the fray as surely and convincingly as a sweaty-metallic-render 3D blade drifting though green wireframe. Afterlife is a zeitgeist topic – Transmediale’s Afterglow theme explored an afterward of an already exploded digital scene; Mark Fisher’s term ‘Hauntology’ connected Derridian theory to underground music/artists like Al Qadiri and Maria Minerva; and the recent New Death exhibition at FACT featured works such as Jon Rafman’s installation, depicting an indecent internet-accelerated-libido as a kind of end-of-the-world-is-now scenario....

"Gavin's insistance that the exhibition ‘examines the utopian ideas surrounding rave before its failure’, seems to ignore what the artists in the show might consider the actual moment of rave's failure....   it would be nice to have a chance to review the impact of a novel like Irvine Welsh's Maribou Stalk Nightmares on this generation, or reflect on how current novelists such as Tao Lin use prose style to echo the afterlife of re-illusioned rave and drug culture.

"The best works in E-Vapour-8 exist as echoes a UK club culture with more ambiguous relations to capitalism and politics than the radical and resistant Acid House rave. The void left by the hedonistic lifestyle is a simulacrum in a work like Faramawy's, for the void left in our lives by the death of the hope of capitalism, and our continued afterlife within it - like a club we're forced to keep revisiting even though it's too expensive the DJs are shit and people keep getting shot."

On the subject of dating the "moment of rave's failure" -  well, in late 1994 I wrote an essay for The Lizard  about "The Death of Rave". I'm sure there were people thinking, if maybe not writing, that rave had died as early as 1990 (when the first wave of acid house mega-parties were crushed / petered out). I think rave - like rock 'n' roll - is in a continual state of dying and being reborn, at times near-simultaneously. Decadence battles it out with influxes of barbarian energy.  The "failure" is latent in the triumph, in so far as all these waves of rebellious energy in popular culture are displacements of political desires.

After writing "The Death of Rave" (whose thesis was more that it had become a  "living death" than it had ceased to exist -- turned into a controlling machine, what Achim Szepanksi - borrowing from Adorno, I think - called the "pleasure-prison") I was soon enough re-enthused by other upsurges (2step, grime). Only to be en-gloomed again, repeatedly. It's a bi-polar cycle of disillusionment and "re-illusionment" (dig Nathan's coinage). Eventually that cycle  wears you out and most likely you'll shift into a "post-belief" state of semi-detached engagement, taking pleasures where you find them. Perhaps enjoying vicariously the fanaticism of others caught up in that first-time-rush of discovery and delusion.
 

rude boy for YEARS

Index FM December 23 1992 Christmas listener phone in