Underground rave comes in from the cold

BACK in the day, few thought rave would ever end up in art galleries. At the time, these sterile, haughty spaces may have been better locations than the car-parks and beaches we usually found ourselves in as another Saturday night turned into a Sunday morning, but they were never going to be sanctioned for use as raving paradises.

For a start, the gallery custodians would probably have called the gardaí out to disperse the invaders. At the height of its notoriety, rave culture was treated by the mainstream with disdain, disgust and suspicion.

This unease is a theme which occurs again and again in Lost in the Rhythm, Matt Stokes's exhibition running at Dublin's Temple Bar Gallery & Studios until February 24th. Documenting a series of cave raves in Britain's Lake District in the early 1990s, Stokes catches both the euphoria of the participants and the fear of those looking on aghast from the sidelines.

Hindsight allows us to guffaw loudly at the notion that pilled-up ravers going mental to SL2, Jonny L, Shut Up and Dance and Altern8 ever presented a real threat to society. While it now seems relatively harmless, it was a different story at the time.

A virtual state of emergency existed across Britain every weekend, with police squads using the same tactics once employed to stop roaming groups of striking miners to prevent ravers in smiley-face T-shirts getting their jollies in open fields.

You can see such panic most clearly in one aspect of Stokes's social anthropology. A TV news report about the cave ravers is the stuff of an Alan Partridge sketch. The camera can pick out only a few empty beer cans on the ground as a sign of the hedonistic debauchery bringing society to its knees.

Rave culture eventually left the fields and went indoors, sparking the superclub revolution of the mid-1990s. In 2007, clubland is very much part of the new mainstream experience and its lexicon has seeped into everyday usage.

It has even finally permeated the art galleries, though the art world seems to prefer repackaged highlights to the actual experience. Today's mavericks need to find other ways to shock rather than going dancing to happy hardcore all night long.

But Stokes's exhibition recalls the days (and nights) when rave really was an outlaw culture. Because they had nowhere else to go, ravers hit the road and took their kickin' sound stacks and blinding lasers to whatever caves, forests, beaches and fields they could find.

As with rave itself, the exhibition is as much about the ephemera and paraphernalia as the bigger social picture. A large array of home-made mix-tapes and club flyers are displayed museum-style, putting the innocence and creativity of those pioneering ravers into a brand new context.

There's also a range of component parts for a collective sound system, with pictures beside some of their proud owners. For all the social questions posed by rave culture's waywardness, those on the ground were more interested in how the generator and PA would escape police attention to get to the site.

Besides documenting clandestine ravers, Lost in the Rhythm also features Stokes's award-winning film of northern soul dancers in a gothic Dundee church. Emotive and endearing, Long After Tonight is a beautifully crafted piece of film, matching the whirling energy of the dancers against the striking imagery of a Episcopalian church (www.templebargallery.com).

And there's even time for one more tune. For those at a loose end on Valentine's Night, Sacred Selections may turn out to be better than a table for two at Burger King.

Featuring pipe organ versions of various happy hardcore anthems (in a similar style to Jeremy Deller's brass band treatments of acid house hits from a few years ago), Sacred Selections takes place at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin next Wednesday at 8pm. Admission is free (www.ccdub.ie). Bring your own glowsticks.