SWEET HARMONY: RAVE | TODAY

modern art with an old-fashioned problem

Derek Ridgers, Spiral Tribe.
Exhibition promo from saatchigallery.com

I really liked the sound of this exhibition. I like a party, I like the vibe of what we now call ‘raves’ (but aren’t really the proper free parties of the 80s and 90s). So I expected this exhibition to give me a little bit of the euphoria those parties were renowned for, albeit in a beautifully distilled and very establishment-palatable form. In that sense, Sweet Harmony was perfect: it fulfilled my expectations entirely. Unfortunately, going on a mediocre night out knowing it’ll be mediocre doesn’t fill anyone with pure joy. This exhibition had me feeling like I’d left the rave at 2am: tired, head spinning, but crushingly sober.

There’s quite a few reasons for that:

1) I slept on my friend’s bedroom floor after we went for drinks, so I wasn’t quite as sparky as maybe the Saatchi needed me to be (not their fault).
2) The lady at the desk physically sneered at my Student Art Pass (£5, gets you reasonable discounts on many paid exhibitions e.g. at the Tate) and loftily informed me that Sweet Harmony had no discounts when I politely requested one on the £10 entry fee (!). If they were trying to recreate the egalitarianism of a free party, 2019-style, then I feel like they managed it…?

3) The interactive/immersive elements of the exhibition absolutely did not evoke rave culture. Sorry, Saatchi. But I’ll come back to that.

The exhibition is really about photography, and highlighting some truly baffling, intense, quite emotional photographs is where it excels. Particular favourites, very different from much of the portrait photography on display, were the three images by Cleo Campert of different rave sites from 1990 – 2015. Their composition brilliantly recalled that of landscapes by Old Masters, in particular Flemish artists, as the label touched upon. For a moment upon reading that caption I glimpsed what I thought the exhibition would become as I moved through it: a consistent examination of the nature of subcultures in contrast to ‘high art’, and the way that the very existence of Sweet Harmony was challenging this. Instead, this interpretation was very much left unfinished as a theme – a slightly sad loss.

The vastness of each room of photography did a better job of evoking the feeling of a rave as it was originally incarnated, for me, than the immersive elements. Enormous prints of some very intimate scenes of the rave experience were fascinating to examine, with the (supposed) levelling effect of the subculture centred in all the labels and interpretation, as well as the elements of political resistance. In terms of the construction of the exhibition, its fabric, this was supported most effectively by the co-curation with photographers, videographers, and artists working at the time. They introduce themselves far better than I could (here: https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php) and their input was, for me, the highlight of the exhibition. It shows how the trend towards co-curation across the industry can work without reducing the source material of an exhibition to a painfully dull series of “eyewitness accounts” from local people. Those are great, in small doses, but frankly turgid after more than three or four, no matter the content. 

All of these things awoke my senses pretty well to the rave ~vibes~ they were trying to provide for the visitor. It’s a bit gutting, then, that all these good vibes were somewhat cancelled out by some very bad (commercial, mundane, even tokenistic) vibes emanating from quite a lot of the exhibition.

Absolutely the most depressing discovery was a bank of Spotify-branded listening stands in a room otherwise beautifully plastered in posters and flyers (including one for a club night at what is now Sheffield Hallam!). I have a personal hatred of glaring sponsorship and this one especially stuck in my craw because the whole POINT of a rave, surely, was to get away from all that branded, mainstream bollocks. They came from pirate radio stations! At least, that was my instinctive reaction. I was very willing to be won over – until I put on headphones expecting a polyphonic masterpiece and got some tinny lo-fi house at a volume I wouldn’t hear on even a fairly quite train. Other immersive lowlights included a similarly relaxing room, meant to replicate a rave, which was mainly some abstract graphics undulating to house music and interspersed with a bit of genteel cheering; and the entrance to the exhibition, a broken wire fence artfully lit to reveal a huge yellow smiley face sprayed onto one of those rubber curtain things you get in a butcher’s. We all took our turns for a moody photo and moved on.

My personal favourite of this underwhelming selection was the bouncy castle. I think it really does sum up the problem with this otherwise great exhibition, and in turn with a modern art gallery’s ability to capture the underground, the hidden, the anti-establishment full stop. This bouncy castle invited us to let go, to feel free like the ravers of the late 80s and early 90s, and to bond with strangers in this shared freedom. Instead, each visitor walked past it to either read the label or stare in minor disgust at the idea of kicking their shoes off. One group of three, evidently on their lunch break, had a quick bounce and then sat awkwardly on the edge chatting, having recorded their hedonism and shared freedom for the ‘gram. (I have no issue with the latter, Instagram is great.) The inability of the bouncy castle to release our inner child marks the contrast between this high curatorial aim and the reality of the gallery space. This white walled, largely silent, slow-procession wander of an exhibition is sleek, neat and well-researched. But it is not radical, or freeing, or even unusually fun.