Modern Institute, Aird’s
Lane, Glasgow until May 11th
Five stars
‘Stonehenge - Built by
Immigrants’ reads the official looking sign set against the red-brick and very
un-Stonehenge-like wall that points to some kind of industrial past. This
conflation of ancient and modern social histories is the perfect marker to this
new show by socio-civic provocateur Jeremy Deller, which puts the 62-minute
film made in 2018 that gives the show its title at its centre.
More clues of its
contents come in Justified and Ancient (2014), a screenprint of a big yellow
smiley, rave culture’s iconic symbol, and here adorned with neolithic stones
for eyes.
Shelleys Laserdome
(2019) is a neon sign for a Stoke-on-Trent nightclub that became one of the
Meccas for a new generation of lost boys and girls.
The film itself is a
vital living history of how working class culture got from the industrial
revolution to the 1980s free party scene, taking in the miners’ strike, New Age
travellers and Greenham Common en route. Filmed during a lecture to A-level
Politics students, Deller charts the move from picket line to pleasure palace
as disenfranchised post-industrial youth took collective action on the
dancefloor to create a cultural revolution that terrified the establishment
enough to make them outlaws as they fought for the right to party.
This politicisation by
default was one of the key drives behind Kieran Hurley’s recently filmed stage
play, Beats, and here Deller talks of techno as folk music, and how the
democratisation of dancefloor hedonism was ‘a death ritual’ for industrial
Britain, as temporary autonomous zones were co-opted by a mainstream of
superclubs and superstar DJs. Using archive footage, he points to the
contradictions of all this using images of Paul Staines, one-time hippy
entrepreneur turned founder of right wing news website Guido Fawkes.
The students look
suitably baffled in this inspiring overview of what might just have been the
counter-culture’s last glow-stick illuminated gasp. By historicising a
youthquake ‘more punk than punk ever was,’ as someone says, it offers
alternatives for people to come together once more.
The List, April 2019
ends
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