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Rave mythologies and ecologies (Part I)

Stefan Peetri (2/2021)

Stefan Peetri analyses the international exhibition "Up All Night: Looking Closely at Rave Culture".



26. III–17. X 2021
Kumu Art Museum, 5th floor
Artists: Jeremy Deller, Rineke Dijkstra, Bogomir Doringer, Kiwa, Sandra Kosorotova, Mark Leckey, Anna-Lena Krause, Sven Marquardt, Tarvo Hanno Varres, Tobias Zielony, The Otolith Group, Anne de Vries, Gillian Wearing
Curator: Kati Ilves
Co-curator: Vanina Saracino



Previous exhibitions at Kumu sharing the closest affinity to this one are perhaps Ryoji Ikeda's solo show "supersymmetry" (11. XII 2015–28. II 2016) and Tommy Cash and Rick Owens' joint exhibition "The Pure and the Damned" (3. V 2019–15. IX 2019), both curated by Kati Ilves. Ilves does not shy away from flirting with pop culture and commercialism in the context of a national art museum. Global rave culture in its diversity certainly offers radical opportunities to experience pop culture, from raves in the secret underground "clubs" of the Palestinian National Authority to commercial megafestivals and "Burning Man"-style raves in Silicon Valley. The exhibition design by Tõnu Narro is a transformation of materials from previous exhibitions into a kind of DIY rave environment. All that is missing is a pounding rave beat. Although on the surface the hedonism of a rave may seem infantile, the explosion of sound and light effects and the mixture of different fashion codes, behavioural norms and dance moves acquire a functional role in the desire-based ecology of the rave.

What is the reason people keep returning to the rave experience and aesthetic over and over again? The rave has needed a mythical basis, being connected to various types of neo-spirituality and psychedelia, pagan and traditional aspects, and a tribalism and paleocultural mentality in late capitalism. The past decade has seen a renaissance of hardcore rave in pop music, for example hyperpop, Tommy Cash, K-Pop and other artists. Already at the end of the noughties, Burial's music had a hint of sweet melancholy, as if the music experienced on the dance floor continued to haunt you as an astral echo on the way home in the morning. How do we explain the "hauntological" dimension of the rave – to borrow some terminology from cultural theorist Mark Fisher – its attractive relationship to memory and nostalgia, which we see in one of the most prominent works in the exhibition, "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" (1999) by Mark Leckey?

 

 

Mark Leckey
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
1999
Video still
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone
Gallery

 

 

Perhaps this has to do with the shredding effect of the technique itself in the form of cut 'n' mix aesthetics, the roots of which are found in William S. Burroughs, Dadaist poetics and musique concrète. The meeting of the avant-garde tradition, dance music, and hedonistic Ecstasy culture was the reason why, for music theorist Simon Reynolds, rave music was so unprecedented and futuristic that it became a "sonic science" in its own right. The time-space tonalities and phrases of different works are suddenly not only combined in an unfamiliar, rhythmic and fast-paced collection of sounds but have been processed beyond recognition. With reference to UFOs, theorist Kodwo Eshun described such sound objects as UAOs (unidentifiable audio objects). The development of the post-processing of pre-recorded sounds in the form of sampling technologies is what makes rave music ontologically ghostly.1

As an object of research, the rave movement with its utopian impulse is certainly an attractive topic, especially considering today's socio-political anxiety, the "rave fasting" and withering of physical experience that accompanied the pandemic. The work that most directly opens up the historical dimension of the exhibition is Jeremy Deller's educational documentary "Everything in The Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992" (2018) on the origins of rave culture and its links with the history of the British working class. The failure of the strikes in the 1980s led to disillusionment in British society. At the same time, video games, new electronic musical instruments and drugs became more accessible to consumers. This paved the way for a cybernetic ecstasy emerging from an underlying political nihilism, which, mixed with various North American and Caribbean sonic cultures, was the reason why the rave movement developed so explosively during this period.

The first thing to greet visitors to the exhibition is Deller's poster series "Exhibition Proposals" (1994–1996), which is an introduction to the symbolism of the rave movement of the 1990s. A poster showing a smiley – a key element in rave aesthetics – and a question: Do you remember the first time?

 

The subcultural identity of rave – "we don't need anyone, we are independent"2

A rave hipster is someone who consumes "subcultural capital", as defined by sociologist Sarah Thornton, who has studied club culture.3 Subcultural capital is based on scene-specific knowledge, such as the ability to find good parties or to own certain vinyl records or cassettes, and so on. Forms of subcultural capital are encountered in the exhibition in the form of portraits and series of photographs where ravers embody their identity through hairstyles, tattoos or poses.

Examples from Estonian photography include Tarvo Hanno Varres' series "Portraits" (1996). The viewer is confronted with a close-up of some figures from Tallinn's fashion and club scene in the 1990s, photographed against a uniformly black, anonymous background. Varres' models are not so much a documentation as they are an expression of generational and subcultural capital – by capturing specific expressions, masks and hairstyles. They do not define themselves through class, but through their individuality. Therefore, the models in his photos can be seen as poster boys and girls in the post-industrial service economy.

Varres' minimalism and anonymity is continued by Anna-Lena Krause's portrayal of Berlin's cultural figures in a 21st-century context in "The Aftermaths" (2015–2017) or the series of photographs "Rudel" (2012) by Sven Marquardt, star bouncer at the nightclub Berghain. Both are photographers' depictions of their friends and peers with whom they loved to party. In the portraits, we meet people from the multicultural and multisexual Berlin nightlife. The white background and title of Krause's photographs refer to the models as "reborn" subjects. Marquardt's photographs of sweat-soaked muscular men show a tenderness in their masculine guise, but also draw attention to a soldier-like libidinality, a willingness to suffer and enjoy it.

 

A pleasure-oriented military-entertainment complex

The masochistic nature of rave pleasure may be explained by its military origins. It would be difficult to imagine the rave movement emerging so intensely in the late 20th century in the absence of stroboscopes, amplifiers, video games and MDMA, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine tablets, also known as Ecstasy. Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling has referred to it as a "military-entertainment complex". But what could a rave experience look like for the 21st century "ADHD (activity and attention deficit disorder) generation", which has grown up with increasingly apocalyptic, interactive and addictive video games and smartphone apps; in other words, whose consciousness is filled with a doomsday sensibility?

Anne de Vries, who has created the exhibition's most technophilic works, "Oblivion" (2016) and "Critical Mass: Pure Immanence" (2015), is interested in how technology of military origin informs and produces today's shared experiences. Her diorama of a hardstyle rave festival with an accompanying video is a good example of the "military-entertainment complex". Looking back at us in the model and video, the rave festival with its peculiar design, giant screens, projections, light show and other such technological intermediaries no longer follows the "less is more" mentality that used to be a key tenet of the punk movement in the 1970s.

De Vries' works also contain passages from various post-humanist texts about technological rationality becoming an increasingly organic part of human life. The video work "Critical Mass: Pure Immanence" highlights Paul Virilio's understanding of pyknolepsy as a sudden and dense series of shifts in consciousness, perceived as a series of micro-orgasms or "little deaths". A rave manifests itself as a blitzkrieg of the senses, as evidenced by subgenres such as hardcore and gabber, which often require a narcotic additive for the body to withstand the sudden sensory onslaught.4 Flirting with apocalyptic aesthetics and theories links the rave experience as ecstasy to global warming, whereby the technical amplification of shared experience, radioactive waste, biomanipulations, and mass extinction become a teleological acceleration toward some collective dissolution. The rave accelerates the apocalyptic fever caused by global warming in the course of human history.

With his video installation "Maskirovka" (2017), Tobias Zielony explores the militarisation of the 21st century experience, alienation due to over-mediation and the schizophrenic attention split of a surveillance society. The title refers to the new hybrid warfare measures used by the Russian foreign intelligence, which Zielony portrays using a stroboscopic eclecticism characteristic of the visual experience of a rave. The sensory blitzkrieg of the rave experience and model are good reference points for mapping 21st century hybrid warfare methods, the technological enforcement of shared experience and the police state. Zielony's "Maskirovka", as well as his photo series "Golden" (2018) about queer youth in Riga, depict the disappearance of social structures, stagnation, deprivation and aimless young people who are alienated from both a fictitious and real empirical militarisation of reality, illustrated by young people with VR goggles in a flat in a Kiev dormitory suburb in "Maskirovka".

The role of light effects and mediation technologies in the rave experience has grown rapidly, making the epileptic emerge as another ideal alongside the ecstatic. Like ecstasy, epilepsy has a religious halo: in ancient times, epileptic seizures were thought to be a kind of encounter with the gods, the human body momentarily becomes a mediator of divine power but pays for it with a gruelling series of strokes and spasms. By the way, talking about the magic of the rave in an interview, the curator of the exhibition has also pointed out the effect of rebirth – how the rave frees the ego through the exhaustion of the body.5

To be continued…6

 

1 Burial is a good example of electronic music that uses rave structures and sounds to explore the nostalgic dimension of rave music, "lost futures", as Mark Fisher has put it.

2 A quote from a raver tripping on E in the work by Marck Leckey.

3 This builds on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital".

4 The parallel with the use of amphetamines by Nazi soldiers is telling here.

5 See https://idaidaida.net/episodes/materialism-2021-05-14.

6 Part II of the article will appear in the next issue of KUNST.EE.


 

Stefan Peetri is a freelance cultural critic; he has studied philosophy and cultural theory at Tallinn University.

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