Creative duo and club stalwarts Martin Green and James Lawler take a utopian yet realistic look at 1990s Queer Britain.
The opening night was a roadblock – For Your Pleasure: 15 Years of DuoVision at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool is an intimate look at Queer club culture in 1990s Britain. Curatorial partnership Martin Green and James Lawler take an in-depth look at a subject they know first hand – Green is a DJ and ran pioneering London club Smashing, Lawler was a keen clubber. The exhibition includes work by four photographers, each with a different take on the topic; David Swindells shows Smashing in action, and Jon Shard documents Flesh at legendary The Hacienda, Manchester. Donald Milne and Marc Vallée show life outside the clubs, Milne depicting indie stars such as Menswear and Pulp, Vallée painting an intimate picture of friends in an East London houseshare.
For Your Pleasure’s press material makes a good case for Queer clubs as safe spaces, Open Eye’s Bronwyn Andrews describing them in terms of “a refuge for queer expression”, adding that their “haven-like quality… allows for freedom of being, movement and connection”. The exhibition gives a sense of immersion in that space, installing Swindells’ and Shard’s images very large in one room, walls painted black and, at the opening night, music playing; have a drink and squint, and it’s almost like being there. But in the next room Milne and Vallée’s work suggests the wider context of those nights out, the era’s utopian possibilities but also its day-to-day.
“There was darkness, and that’s why the clubs were so important”
– Marc Vallée, photographer
It was a time when “freedom of being, movement, and connection” were in the air in general; as the lyrics of Pulp’s 1995 song Common People suggest, pop stars then could be working class and proud, glamorous but down-to-earth; working class students could also rub shoulders with the super rich at art college. These sentiments carry through in Milne’s portraits of the group, one of which shows them elegant and poised in a greasy spoon cafe. Another shows the group’s singer, Jarvis Cocker, on a grotty though also lush red carpet. Vallée shows two handsome young souls, meanwhile, in their raggedy rented home – retro wallpaper, kitsch posters and all. “I met one of the boys in a club, and told him I wanted to photograph him,” says Vallée. “But I was very clear that I didn’t want to photograph inside a club. My images very much show a queer domestic space.”
Vallée published these images in 2020 in a zine called When I was at Art School in the 90s covered by BJP; as the name suggests, he took them while he was studying (he graduated the Sir John Cass School of Art with a BA in 1997, and an MA 1999). The house was where the guys really lived, and both it and Vallée’s student years speak of an East London now receding from view. The YBAs were still drinking in the Golden Heart, and Whitechapel, around the CASS, was still “gritty”. Other aspects of the time were similarly dystopian. The homosexual age of consent was still 21 until 1994, and 18 until the year 2000. “We still had a homophobic government, and AIDS was still there,” comments Vallée. “There was darkness, and that’s why the clubs were so important.”
It’s an important context for an era now sometimes reduced to good times because, while the 1990s continue to fascinate, it’s mostly 90s club culture, fashion, and music. A good time was certainly had – and the 1990s had an optimism now sorely missed – but there was also another side. As Open Eyes’ Andrews points out, Queer club spaces are places of refuge, interesting in their own right but providing respite from something. Founded in 2010, DuoVision specialise in curating exhibitions by undervalued artists and, as For Your Pleasure shows, under-acknowledged perspectives and narratives. Upstairs at Open Eye there’s a video on the duo and their practice, newly commissioned by the gallery.