Get this: the art world and clubland have a lot in common. Both operate under layers of assumed knowledge. Both are full of wankers. And, crucially, both are money-making exercises masquerading as cultural exploration. So it’s not surprising then that occasionally, gallerists slum it in Dalston bunkers and us dancers whip an iron out and stand nervously in the corner of a converted butchers meekly sipping on free beers at a private view, wondering how many we can sink before anyone notices that we shouldn’t really be there.
Despite their similarities they aren’t exactly perfect bedfellows. The gallery is, in a way, the dichotomic opposite of the nightclub. Galleries are hushed spaces of internal, private contemplation, white washed rooms where a self-conscious sense of reverence cloaks everything. You go to a gallery to look, to examine to think. A nightclub, traditionally, is a space of limitless excess, a zone depersonalization where the reality of the real is subsumed by the fantasies of the night’s unrealities. If you’re thinking in a nightclub, it’s probably about if you should get another pinger in. One exists to freeze life, the other to celebrate it.
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Things though, as they do in life, every so often, entwine. Art steps into the club and the club ends up the walls of the artworld. Just this week it was revealed that Daniel Avery, in a move brokered by a Danish headphone manufacturer, has recorded a new song, “Decision 2” as a direct response to Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s Decision exhibition which is currently showing at London’s Hayward Gallery. How Avery’s lithe piece of ambient relates to Decision is slightly beyond us, but it’s a crystal clear example of club orientated artists working with and around contemporary art. Next week sees the beginning of Music For Museums, a whole season of events at the Whitechapel Gallery which aims to “explore the intersection of visual art and experimental music,” which, admittedly, sounds like standard Wire feature fare, but with the likes of Carsten Nicolai, Florian Hecker and Mark Fell involved it’ll have us scratching our beards with joy.
Given that the idea that art should exist as a primarily functional, representational form of representation — the idea, simply, that artworks should reflect reality in as real a way as possible — was shunted into a ditch in about 1950, it’s not surprising that our galleries and museums don’t drip with portaits of gurning ravers. I mean, actually, that is a bit odd as art has always been a democratic form of expression that, in theory, serves to document as much of human existence as possible, but still, the point remains: the traditional arts (painting, sculpture) have largely neglected nightclubbing.
What we have instead are moments of infiltration, moments when worlds try and sneakily converge. The point of this potential convergence seems to be a kind of shared sense of credibility: the artist get the cultural cachet of looking like they care about youth culture and the DJ or producer gets to get a taste of the academy’s acceptance. And the free wine they give out at those endless and endlessly dull PVs.
These moments — moments when the two worlds explicitly converge and comment on each other, creating work as direct forms of response to both sets of stimuli — are, in a way, anomalies. They also, importantly, come in a variety of forms. The ICA’s Ibiza: Moments in Love exhibition, a bright, brash poster heavy celebration of the island’s early days as a party destination, was a very different beast from Jeremy Deller’s Tate Modern hung The History of the World (an enlarged spider diagram that maps out the cultural route from brass bands to acid house via advance capitalism, the KLF, and Castlemorton). Similarly, Mark Leckey’s peerless video piece Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is a million miles from Gavin Watson’s exhibited photographs of ravers in the late 80s, even if they share a cultural milieu.
What they all do, though, is perform a service which should, you’d think, given that it’s 2015 after all, be unnecessary — they legitimize the act of clubbing. They give a kind of broadsheet review sheen to the apparently seedy act of spending night after night in dark rooms listening to loud repetitive music surrounded by people experiencing varying levels of inebriation. They make the unacceptable acceptable, palatable, and sellable. They commodify the already commodified. They turn club culture into a postcard you can buy in the shop after, a glossy book to keep alongside the Supreme espresso cups on your Ikea coffee table.
It could be argued however that the gallery, now, at least, offers an alternative to the nightclub. Look at the way acts like Future Brown and Evian Christ have held events at the ICA, or Rinse’s Tate takeover at the tail end of last year. Christ’s example is probably the most extreme of the lot. Rinse threw a good party in an unusually monumental space, which is great, but a party is a party. Future Brown, for all their conceptual baggage and talk of “cultural accelerationism” used one of London’s premier arts spaces to play a standard gig. Evian Christ did something different.
The Trance War: Archives and Documentation, 1998 – Ongoing, a project the producer and DJ devised alongside the graphic designer David Rudnick, with the support of Warp and Arts Council England was the kind of project that shows that, yes, dance music — to use that reductive, unhelpful, meaningless term — can use gallery space as intriguingly as visual artists can and do. It was boldly and baldly conceptual, focusing on the invented, created and curated idea of the titular trance wars. The live performance, and the attending show, and the website that ran alongside all of it, was a truly conceptual piece, as is fitting of our conception of what art is, and what function it performs, in the post-postmodern era.
Veteran 1999, 2015
– David Rudnick & Evian Christ
With it’s 30,000 strong list of fallen dogs — an eternally scrolling monument to the “dead” of a fictitious “war” — the website gave the performance gravtias, and vice versa. Christ seemed, to me at least, to be exploring the boundary between actually good art and our idea of what good are should be — even if the idea of attempting to every codify art into truly objective categories of “good” or “bad” is an inherently Sisyphean ordeal.
That, however, is the joy of art, and indeed of dance music. It’s an eternal search for the gold amongst the rubble, the diamonds in the rough, the sweet sweetcorn in the shit. In an ideal world art would be as democratic, as communal, as inclusive as we know club culture can be. Barriers need to be broken down, relationships rebuilt. The gallery needs to become the club. It never needs to be the other way round.
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