Peace Love and Anarchy = Freedom and Fun Forever
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EXHIBITION: FRI 9TH JUN – SAT 1ST JUL, MON – SAT, 12 – 6PM
PRIVATE VIEW: THUR 8TH JUN, 7PM
Peace Love and Anarchy = Freedom and Fun Forever is an exhibition as mood board. It is the first partial retrospective document of 64- 65 Guildford Street a squatted house where a lot happened to a lot of people over a short space of time a long time ago. Milch, the gallery that claimed to reach the parts that other galleries cannot reach was started here, and ran on in different locations, and with a new lead for some 13 years or so. A nuanced 18th century house, generous spaces, floor boards, light and height, and delicate textures.
Opening by coincidence on election night, June 8th, in a new London, remade daily with glass and steel, this exhibition, through image, artefact and ephemera, provides a moment of reflection on the immense social and political changes that have transformed London over the past 29 or so years since this house was occupied. The law of the land in 1988 made squatting a double house near Russell Square, both possible and legal, we lived and worked and partied, in conducive, cocoon architecture for 5 eventful years. It was seminal. To consider this in contemporary language, this mood board of an exhibition might also stand as some kind of beginning for a case study of the multiple cultural impacts that have subsequently developed from the chance encounters that our home 64-65 Guilford Street made possible. From this house cultural legacies can be found now in the Tate Collection, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, in hearts and minds, creating top content in Hollywood, inscribed on, and pierced into the bodies of some millions of millennial barista’s right across our glass steel globe.
Laibach, Johann Sebastian Bach, Lawren Maben, Les Fleurs du mal, Marguerite Yourcenar, Einstürzende Neubauten, transgression, £1.50 can last 3 days, answer phones on land lines, The Story of O, big salads, Diamanda Galás, The Smiths, taking clothes off and putting someone else’s on again, Milch, Peace Love & Anarchy, Adrian Searle, Rose English, Grayson Perry, cocaine, Bodymap, Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, lead pipes, Tempeh, Angela Lyras, Neo Naturists, Heidegger, Marjorie Allthorpe Guyton, the World is our Oysters, the Marquis de Sade, parking meters, The Great Bear, Customs & Excise, chris tmas show, good sex, bad sex, Baudrillard, SEXSEX, transatlantic telephone calls, yoga, the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, heroine, fractal geometry, the Piccadilly Line, wattle and daub, floor boards, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, home grown Discipline and Punishment, Modern Medicine, Mary Lemley, passion, fury, lilies, more lilies, beautiful lilies, beautiful Yolande, extension cables, the Soho Brasserie, Kinky Gerlinky, Compendium Books, Curious Orange, Freedom & Fun Forever, Fred’s.
Merlin Carpenter, Dominic Berning, Alex Binnie, Christine Binnie, Hamad Butt, Merlin Carpenter, Steve Chivers, Trevor Clarke, Simon Costin, Fiona Dennison, Douglas Gordon, Georgie Hopton, Cheryl Hubbard, Moan Kehr, Mary Lemley, Lawren Maben, Cassius Matthias, Nazrin Montag, Christopher Muller, Simon Patterson, Simon Periton, Josephine Pryde, Nils Norman, Nick Reeves, Carolyn Roy, Nicola Tyson, Simon Vincenzi, Anand Zenz
Co-ordinated by Sarah Staton, With thanks to DACS, Dan Mitchell and all contributors.