A postmodernist lecture on acid house by contemporary artist Jeremy Deller.
A high-school student’s dream come true: a young-looking teacher with messy hair comes to class with a selection of videos from raves. This is exactly what happens in Everybody in The Place by artist, curator, Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller. Deller’s political works often comment on pop culture (he visited Andy Warhol’s Factory during his youth) and the world of music (think of the performance where Deller got a group of painters to draw a naked Iggy Pop), and Frieze invited the artist to produce a film for Second Summer of Love—the fair’s program exploring the cultural impact of late 1980s music.
With a title borrowed from a Prodigy song, the documentary is based on Deller’s hour-long lecture at an English high school. Discussing the beginning and development of underground rave culture in the context of social shakeups of the Thatcher era, Deller avoids lengthy descriptions of acid fashion and music, and instead focuses on miners’ strikes, compares early house clubs to churches, and brings in Marxist theory to reiterate an obvious but important point: whatever we do is politics—and rave was no exception.
Everybody in the Place
Director: Jeremy Deller
UK, 2019. 61 min. 16+