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Review

Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based between Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

In Nav Haq’s _RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture_, we get a decentralized portrait of a community of outsider insiders. The term “outsider insiders” may sound incongruous, but, as the reader learns, rave is founded upon myriad internal contradictions. Haq explains: “As a movement, \[rave\] enacted a desire to be autonomous, and possessed many other social facets… curiously embodying both dystopian and utopian impulses simultaneously, part neo-hippy romanticism, part blithe hedonism.”[^1] Encompassing first-person accounts, interviews, essays and extensive documentation of artist projects about rave, the book’s contents are decentralized in the sense of presenting necessarily divergent narratives of a complex and ongoing movement.

Haq, a curator at M HKA[^2] in Antwerp, explores rave’s post-industrial origins and its evolution, including the cross-pollination of rave’s many subgenres. It seems appropriate that a book about rave, especially one taking into account its visual, aural and social implications, would host a variety of perspectives and Haq’s approach as editor reflects his multi-disciplinary experience. Mixing interviews – including with fashion designer Walter van Beirendonck and Renaat Vandepapeliere, owner of the independent Belgian label R&S Records – with profiles of artists whose work responds to rave culture, the reader is offered an overview of rave’s late 1980s and 1990s heyday. Though allusions are made to North American technical and artistic influences, in particular the acid house scenes of Detroit and Chicago, the book’s focus is essentially post-industrial Great Britain and Europe.

The texts, scans and photo documentation that comprise RAVE depict the titular movement as at once intensely inclusive and exclusive. This tension between openness and secrecy is manifest, too, in Haq’s attention to artistic decisions about anonymity and access. Underground events, illegal venues, purposefully inscrutable album covers – lacking either artist or album name – and ever-changing DJ monikers demanded a kind of direct engagement from audience or listener. When asked by Haq about the freedom of using different identities, electronic musician and producer Wolfgang Voigt replies:

When people \[went\] to their local independent record stores, they \[stood\] in front of a wall, full of black records with no names on them. No names and no pop stars behind them that were really well known. And they would come in, put the record on the headphones and decide if they liked it or not, only through listening to the music. They didn’t care where it came from. It could be from the neighbourhood, or from the other side of the world. I found that it was really a great thing in the sense of the freedom of music. And that was one of the reasons that I decided to use different monikers – not to push the person behind it, but just as a project name. And the other thing is that if you fail, if you don’t like this project anymore, or if nobody else likes it, you can stop it the next day.[^3]  
Much of _RAVE_ focuses upon the purported freedom of identity and expression available to rave artists and attendees alike. Haq discusses political resistance and insubordination in 20th-century rave in relation to the default means of mass connection today: the Internet. With reference to Mark Fisher’s essay “Baroque Sunsets,” Haq contextualizes 1980s and 1990s rave culture as a means of critiquing neoliberal accelerationism and its effect on contemporary cultural engagement.“Parallels could also easily be drawn,” Haq contends, “between the suppression of the rave moment and the current attempts to control the cultures of the ‘open’ Internet, often described by net activists as the second enclosure of the commons.”[^4]

As photography and video works engaging individual and crowd identity (such as by Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijkstra and Mark Leckey) make clear, the factors contributing to working-class dissolution and reactionary cultural output varied widely between physical locations before and after 1989.[^5] Nevertheless, common oppressive features, such as government austerity and the increased policing of activities that could mobilize working-class resistance, contributed to a sense of universal struggle. In post-Soviet regions, youth culture was being negotiated differently than in places like London and Paris, which had been steeping in their own punk and new wave histories and subsequent disenfranchisement. _RAVE_ provides an overview of these distinctions, focusing specifically on rave’s immersive aesthetic.

Many of the featured artist projects reflect efforts to interpret the identity of a generation engaged in rave subcultures: acid house, gabber, hardcore, new beat, break beat, drum and base, jungle, trance, techno, et cetera. Intriguingly, attempts to holistically interpret European rave’s “influence on art and culture” turn out to be largely reliant on the self-identification of its practitioners. The interviews in _RAVE_ provide opportunities for Haq to push pioneers to reflect on their own cross-disciplinary influences.

Within the text, attention is rarely afforded to the ways in which rave failed to be truly universal; the lack of BIPOC and female-identified artists leads the reader to desire more comprehensive histories. The notion, however, that cheap, accessible technology could catalyze the existence of relatively spontaneous and non-hierarchical spaces – what anarcho-theorist Hakim Bey calls “Temporary Autonomous Zones” – is compelling, especially for the contemporary reader who scrolls their iPhone waiting for ever-withheld catharsis. Reflecting upon covert analog and early-digital systems used to circulate artistic content and event information has the potential to inform today’s conversations about offline networks and the protection of DIY spaces and projects.

Rather than spectacle, the reader is led to see rave culture as primarily about gathering, an activity with renewed viability in the present. Refreshingly, Haq doesn’t force the political parallels, but provides the reader with opportunities to draw their own conclusions, sparking, along the way, questions about festival culture, arts tourism and commercialization. The many scans of legal restrictions on rave-related activities in the final “Legislature” chapter reminds us that the freedoms at stake in early rave may have more in common with challenges faced in other arts sectors than one might expect.

[^1]: “Introduction: The Electro-Chemical Black Swan,” _RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture_, ed. Nav Haq (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016), 12.
[^2]: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium is commonly known as the M HKA or MuHKA. 
[^3]: “Without Borders: Interview with Wolfgang Voigt,” _RAVE_, 172.
[^4]: “Introduction: The Electro-Chemical Black Swan,” _RAVE_, 14.
[^5]: Within rave history, 1989 is often termed “the second summer of love” in reference to the hippie movement of 1969\. “Glossary,” RAVE, 37.

Writer

Land

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This is a review of Nav Haq’s “RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture” (Black Dog Publishing, 2016).

RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture Edited by Nav Haq

Jon Davies is a Montreal-based curator and writer. He recently received his PhD in Art History from Stanford University.

On the inside back cover of Eric Kostiuk Williams’ _Babybel Wax Bodysuit_ (BWB) comic, we find a portrait of the artist. Against a background of preliminary sketches, he has drawn an iPhone mirror selfie. Kostiuk Williams’ toned torso is awash in polka dots, his perfectly coiffed hair crowning a warped face: cubic protuberances emerge from his forehead, his eyes are cold, black slits and impossibly long fangs emerge from a gaping, walrus-like mouth marked by a cleft lip.

Kostiuk Williams identifies wholeheartedly with the gender-fluid monsters that populate his comics. Through his deliriously protean drawing style, his characters shape-shift, unbounded by physical laws. _BWB_ depicts a buxom, glistening red blob in heels emerging from the primordial mire in a series of sick’ning glamour poses. She is the red wax container of Babybel cheese come to life: one moment embodying a perpetually transforming queer life force; the next, a protective casing in which to hide away from the horrors of the world. She is the id of drawing itself, malleable to suit the needs of queer and trans fantasy – and its motivating force, survival – in the 21st century.

Kostiuk Williams emerged in the early 2010s with his thrilling Hungry Bottom Comics series, collected in 2014\. They chart his transformation from what he’d later call the “depths of closeted adolescent despair” (in Ottawa) into the “slinky, self-possessed fire hazard you see today.” His sissy _Bildungsroman_ begins with his move to Toronto, where he discovers alternative queer histories, cultural touch-stones and community in a city that seems intent on bulldozing its own past. Kostiuk Williams knows the clichés of gay coming- of-age narratives well, and he self-satirizes his emerging consciousness with a disarming emotional sensitivity. He also has a fiercely catty perspective on our current political situation, with _BWB_ kicking off with a ripped, nude Justin Trudeau straddling the houses of parliament as blobs of pipeline oil check their iPhones and Klansmen ride by on giant Trump-roaches.

What is so compelling about Kostiuk Williams’ work is how he exposes his vulnerabilities as well as his anxieties about the artist’s ambiguous position within contemporary capitalism: from the maw of social media “likes” and rapacious gentrification to the pressures on artists and other “creatives” to be productive, entrepreneurial brands (“Expedite your process and the reading experience, with this efficient 9-panel grid!”). Instead, the ethos of his drawing style takes shape as a ferocious deluge of curvaceous lines and impossible figures that break free, bursting out of geometries that are powerless to contain them. Social media manifests as alien tendrils physically connecting people as they reach between the frames, while gossip is figured as an oozy, hydra-headed amphibian baring infinite teeth. As Kostiuk Williams notes in his beautiful homage to early superhero fan message boards, “The Literal Word,” it’s “as if me and web 2.0 were going through puberty at the same time.” In the face of Facebook self-love and confirmation bias, he laments, “I want to see outside myself again.”

Kostiuk Williams’ new opus, _Condo Heartbreak Disco_, leaves behind the directly autobiographical in order to dramatize the potential “end” of a near-future Toronto through the eyes of two divine femme mutants: diva totems Komio and The Willendorf Braid are BFFs who’ve settled down after an eternity spent strutting through time and space. Komio resembles a Pierrot-masked glamazon with a septum piercing, while The Braid is a ball of hair in stilettos modelled after the Venus of Willendorf. (They could have vogued straight out of the notorious Hotnuts dance party that has unleashed otherworldly drag creatures onto Toronto since 2006.) The narrative loosely picks up from the epic “Britney Jean” sci-fi story that closes _BWB_, which sees Britney Spears still dazzling fans in Vegas in 2116 as an “artificial intelligence cyborg” (billed as “the comeback that keeps comin’ back!”). Enslaved and exploited by her programmer-overlords, she comes in contact with an ancient order of women capable of intervening in the fate of the world.

Komio and The Braid live with a Jane Jacobs doppelgänger in a barely affordable apartment in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, which, as Kostiuk Williams explains in a potted history of the one-time village, was once an affluent, desirable enclave until the Gardiner Expressway cut off the area from the nearby waterfront. It is now the kind of centrally located, working-class neighbourhood ripe for condofication. Our two queens brunch at queer hub The Beaver and face down a legion of yoga moms jogging strollers filled with mewling babies, who resemble saber-toothed Starbucks lattes. Shady Komio earns money in this “‘spensy” town by exacting revenge on aggro bros who victimize women, while The Braid offers “guidance and solace” to tortured souls. Without revealing too much of the wildly imaginative plot, the duo encounter a scheme to raze what is left of Parkdale– and beyond – for hyper-accelerated condo construction, after the developers track an Instagram feed by a “trendy stylist/photographer” (who goes by the name of aphextwink), who has taken to creeping Parkdale’s dispossessed to generate glib comments and algorithmic attention. (Of course the developers brand their blight as “Readymade Art Condos.”) Is Toronto doomed to become a dystopian ghost town of empty glass towers?

Kostiuk Williams’ sinuous, bendy lines and libidinal energy fuse his sci-fi super-diva narrative with the textures of everyday queer life gleaned from years spent observing his adopted home. Throughout, there is a wistful sense of how great the city could be were it to value its underground, subcultural bustle rather than reaching up to the sky.

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This is a review of “Babybel Wax Bodysuit”, (Retrofit Comics (Philadelphia) and Big Planet Comics (Washington, DC) 2016), and “Condo Heartbreak Disco” (Koyama Press (Toronto) 2017), both authored by Eric Kostiuk Williams.

Babybel Wax Bodysuit and Condo Heartbreak Disco by Eric Kostiuk Williams

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