You Are Dancing With Death
Words Catharine Rossi Images Into the Night
Open on Zurich’s Spiegelgasse from February to July 1916, Cabaret Voltaire was a key centre for dadaism, the movement that positioned the absurd and the irrational as the only response to the war raging beyond Switzerland’s borders. Unassumingly located in the backroom of a basement restaurant, Cabaret Voltaire hosted artworks by the likes of Jean (Hans) Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Pablo Picasso on its blue-painted walls, while its tiny stage provided a platform for often impromptu sound-poetry performances, music recitals and readings of texts by Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky and French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry. Cabaret Voltaire was a subterranean safe haven for avant-garde activity, and its imprint on the history of modern art far outweighs its short life and small dimensions.
Following decades of disrepair, the venue re-opened in 2004 as a bar, exhibition and performance space. While the physical building still stands, however, all that remains of its historical activities and original interior is a scant mix of artworks, photographs (the veracity of which is debated) and a postcard of a (lost) painting of the action-filled interior by artist and architect Marcel Janco, depicting himself and other dada artists performing onstage amidst the Cabaret’s packed crowd with one of Janco’s skull-like masks hovering over their heads.
Cabaret Voltaire’s creative past and its near immaterial heritage encapsulate the curatorial opportunities and challenges facing Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art, an exhibition opened in late 2019 at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. Curated by Florence Ostende, it examines cabarets, clubs, cafés and bars from the 1880s to the 1960s in 12 cities across the world, including Berlin, Mexico City, Osogbo and Rome. It is a story bookended by the 1881 opening of the near mythical Chat Noir in Paris, widely understood to mark the beginnings of artistic cabaret, and the 1966 establishment of Rasht 29 in Tehran, a centre for the saqqakhaneh art movement, which combined international modernism with local traditions. The exhibition’s global reach, unusual subject matter, and combination of familiar and lesser-known schools and spaces reflect the Barbican’s aim to provide an alternative art history, one that looks at what Ostende calls “transcultural networks of modernist art and the production of critical spaces at a global scale”.
Designed by architects Caruso St John and graphic designers John Morgan Studio, who have provided a rich if sombre palette including blue, brown, green and black, Into the Night is spread over the two floors of the Barbican gallery. It starts on the upper level, where each venue is examined separately using historical material — mostly artworks, documents, furnishings and photographs.
Intriguingly, however, while the catalogue is in chronological order, the exhibition is not. Ostende has rejected the currently unfashionable possibility of creating a canonical, hierarchical story in favour of a more distributed, decentred approach. Among other things, this shows the international links evident in the way that artists carried their Cabaret Voltaire experiences into other projects, a prominent example being Café Aubette (1928) in Strasbourg, which Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp designed with artist Theo Van Doesburg.
While this approach makes the visitor work hard, it creates interesting juxtapositions and connections. The exhibition opens with Cabaret Fledermaus, established in 1907 by the Wiener Werkstätte collective. Almost entirely designed by architect Josef Hoffman, the basement venue featured a bar lined with thousands of multicoloured tiles and an auditorium that often showcased progressive female singers and dancers such as Marya Delvard and Miss Macara. A link can be made to 1920s and 1930s Berlin, discussed later in the show, where this same creative freedom was afforded to the straight, gay and transgender women and men who frequented the capital’s rapidly growing number of avant-garde venues. The city’s embrace of such permissive hedonism wasn’t entirely welcomed; it caused the government to plaster advertising kiosks with posters that exhorted, “Berlin, stop and think, you are dancing with death.”
From Vienna, Into the Night moves to 1920s Mexico City and the Café de Nadie (Nobody’s Café). The figure behind this venue was the poet Manuel Maples Arce, a leading member of the estridentismo (stridentism) movement, which championed art and literature that expressed the contemporary urban condition. In this vein, Maples Arce published a manifesto condemning “Chopin to the electric chair!” This anti-conservatism was given full throat in the café, where the radical group debated, published and put on exhibitions. Their activities are represented in the Barbican through publications as well as artworks including masks and woodcuts, the latter of which we are told were exhibited in a subsequent iteration of the Café de Nadie, a huge travelling tent called the Carpa Amaro.
Into the Night is not only impressive for its geographical reach but also for its originality: Ostende has effectively built this subject area from scratch given that cabarets and clubs have largely been overlooked in histories of art, architecture and design, despite the rich creativity that they represent. This is part of a broader omission of the creative significance of nocturnal leisure spaces in the 20th and 21st centuries, although Into the Night also exemplifies a growing focus on these spaces, particularly in the realm of exhibitions. In 2019 London welcomed both Sweet Harmony: Rave Today at the Saatchi Gallery and Queer Spaces: London, 1980s-Today at the Whitechapel Gallery, which included an examination of the role of clubs, bars and cabarets as LGBTQI+ social spaces. Next year sees Studio 54: Night Magic at Brooklyn Museum and the arrival of Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today at Designmuseum Danmark, which first opened at Vitra Design Museum in March 2018. This is where I confess I co-curated Night Fever, alongside Jochen Eisenbrand and Nina Serulus, an experience that has left me with an ongoing interest in club creativity and its curatorial treatment.
While these exhibitions vary in their scope and size, each highlights the creative, social, political and economic significance of nocturnal creativity. The Queer Spaces press release describes how venues such as Soho’s Black Cap and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern have provided a “vital place for LGBTQ+ people to find community, socialise, and explore identities outside the mainstream”. Writing in the Sweet Harmony catalogue, former The Face editor Sheryl Garratt describes “the biggest legacy” of the 1980s and 1990s rave scene as “the creativity it unleashed”, one that spanned from designing clothes, flyers and club interiors to putting on parties and exhibitions.
Night Fever included clubs such as Florence’s Space Electronic (1969), co-owned and designed by Gruppo 9999 of the Radical Design movement. The architects celebrated the nightclub as a new spatial typology unfettered by commodification or architectural convention. 9999 architect Carlo Caldini described Space Electronic as a “pluri-disco” for its multiplicity of activities: its stage and dance floors hosted live music, poetry, nude theatre, and even an architectural festival, for which 9999 grew vegetables on one dance floor and turned another into a temporary lake, complete with plants and stepping stones. The show also included Studio 54 (1977). While often thought of as a celebrity haunt, the Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell-owned venue was also a creative incubator: the opening night featured a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; Issey Miyake conceived the club’s first birthday party; and it had a huge influence on partygoers Michael Kors and Rick Owens, just two of many fashion designers whose careers were shaped by club culture. It is easy to trace a lineage from these spaces to the present day through designer Charles Jeffrey, whose east London Loverboy club night later developed into a fashion label. “When I started doing a party it was an excuse for me to do work that wasn’t under the constraints of my [fashion] MA and all the pressures of that,” Jeffrey told Disegno in 2017. “It was a really good way for me to cut loose and do something that felt normal and natural.”[1]
Despite the multifaceted significance of club culture, Into the Night, Night Fever and Queer Spaces have all been motivated by concerns around the field’s contemporary condition and what Ostende describes as questions of “how we occupy public space today”. Between 2005 and 2016 the number of nightclubs in the UK nearly halved, falling from slightly more than 3,000 to 1,700. The number of clubs in London fell by a third and the city’s LGBTQI+ venues faced disproportionally high levels of closure. This drop is attributed to a number of factors, including changing social behaviours (such as reduced alcohol and drug consumption, and the rise of the wellbeing trend); competition provided by the rise of dating apps and festivals; and gentrification, which forces out venues due to high rents and hostile licensing legislation. On a more positive note, new spaces have been opening, among them the Bussey Building, Oval Space and Printworks, all in south London. These are reinventing the idea of the contemporary nightclub in ways that link back to its earlier history by hosting events, exhibitions and even co-working spaces. Printworks has gained huge popularity through its daytime raves, but the 6,000-capacity venue exemplifies how vulnerable the club scene is today. Printworks is a temporary club, as are other new ventures such as the Drumsheds in Tottenham and Mayfield Depot in Manchester. It is an example of what is generally termed a “meanwhile” space; the building is owned by developers who are effectively mobilising club culture to scope and prepare areas for regeneration, a phenomenon journalist Jessica Mairs branded “clubwashing” in Icon magazine.
What these series of exhibitions indicate is that when clubs close, or their authenticity and sustainability is threatened, we lose a vital space of creative and social freedom. This makes it even more crucial that such events clearly communicate the importance of this culture past and present. This is where we arrive at the challenge facing curators working in this realm. In the catalogue for Into the Night, Ostende describes how there are scant physical remnants of Cabaret Voltaire and what remains is largely paper-based. It is insufficient material for bringing the story alive. However, the real issue is whether any amount of objects could ever truly communicate the history of spaces that were as much about ambience and the ephemeral as they were physical artefacts and structures. Caldini called the architecture of Space Electronic “nonexistent” because of its construction by light and sound, and bodies and atmosphere, rather than bricks and mortar; Schrager similarly describes the interior design of Studio 54 and the later Palladium (1985) as based on magic, “elevated experience” and sensory stimulation. Ostende seems all too aware of the resulting curatorial difficulties. As she states in the catalogue, “any attempt to evoke the exhilarating life of the Cabaret Voltaire in the present seems doomed to fail.”
Different exhibitions have addressed this in a variety of ways. Sweet Harmony presented a combination of art installations and period photography from the likes of Conrad Shawcross and Vinca Petersen. The latter’s contributions included a handwritten autobiographical diary of the rave scene that ran the length of a gallery wall, and a bouncy castle that she takes to orphanages and schools across the world — a legacy of the life fulfilling collective joy she found in the rave scene. However, the sign requesting visitors not to jump on the bouncy castle exemplified the problem of making an exhibition about experiences that you can’t let people access. For Night Fever, designer Konstantin Grcic drew on the material culture of clubbing, including neon, scaffolding and flight cases, to create the exhibition design. He also collaborated with club lighting designer Matthias Singer and music consultant Steffen Irlinger to create an audio-visual installation that was intended to help visitors not only see but feel and hear club culture, in at least one part of the show.
Ostende has gone even further for Into the Night, staging recreations of four venues that are also examined elsewhere in the exhibition: a shadow-puppet theatre that was the star attraction of Chat Noir, complete with a soundtrack by Claude Debussy and Erik Satie; the Hoffman-designed bar at the Fledermaus, including the 7,000 multicoloured and patterned tiles of the original interior, made at the University of Applied Arts Vienna; a section of the Van Doesburg-designed multicoloured ciné-dancing room at L’Aubette, which screens Hans Richter’s 1921 film Rhythmus 21 (Van Doesburg was a fan of the German artist); and, lastly, a composite of two outdoor Mbari clubs from 1960s Nigeria, showing contemporary documentaries of the spaces. Encountered as you enter the gallery’s ground floor, these feel separate from the more archival treatments of the spaces on the floor above.
Notwithstanding the huge effort that has gone into these recreations, they didn’t quite do it for me. Speaking to me after I had seen the show, Ostende explained that “the idea was not to replicate the atmosphere of the club or replicate what it was to be in the cabaret, because you would ultimately fail.” Too true. But as Caldini and Schrager attest, atmosphere was a key part of the design of such spaces and central to the creativity they fostered. Without this aspect, the recreations feel too illustrative, denying the experiential dimension the exhibition format affords, and which this subject requires. Ostende and the exhibition designers did consider other options, including integrating the historical material located upstairs in these installations, but it was decided that this would prove too distracting. I tend to agree, although it was notable that these recreations were interspersed with, and followed by, examples of the more conventional curatorial treatments of the spaces found upstairs: the room exploring Cabaret Voltaire was sandwiched between the Fledermaus and Mbari club recreations, and the latter is followed by the last four sections of the show, which examine London’s Cave of the Golden Calf (1912), New York’s Harlem in the 1920s and 1940s, and Tehran’s Rasht 29. This slightly confused juxtaposition raises the question of whether there could have been a greater proximity between the historical and installation-based treatments of the four spotlit venues — an intention perhaps frustrated by the Barbican’s quite prescriptive gallery layout.
This is not to say that other shows on nocturnal creativity have got it right — there is no clear solution to this curatorial conundrum. Rather, it is to acknowledge the challenge facing Into the Night and other exhibitions examining art, architecture and design as lived, embodied and situated experiences. How can they tread the fine line between education and entertainment, between experience and information, between real and reconstructed? How can curators tackle the intangible and ephemeral qualities of art, design and architecture? And how can they communicate the exhilaration and excitement of time spent in clubs, cabarets and other spaces for nocturnal escapism? Ultimately, perhaps what is most interesting about Into the Night is not the history it tells but how it tells it.
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[1] See ‘Club Catharsis’ in Disegno #16 for a full interview with Jeffrey.
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This feature originally appeared in the Winter 2019/20 edition of Disegno, the Quarterly Journal of Design.
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