curated by the Centre of Attention
(Pierre Coinde and Gary O'Dwyer)

We decided to look into our past and look at other radical, interesting, avant-garde spaces and endeavours in London in the last 50 years or so. What we found was fascinating and inspiring and what amounts to a secret history of the London Art world. 

Our exercise in Ancestor Worship is aimed at drawing attention to these virtually undocumented endeavours and at creating a total art work using these art interfaces/spaces as the material. 

We have focused on the entities that share with us a curatorial quality and come some way as exemplifying the gallery as producer, the space as the author, which is to say that the space can be the artist. And like the artist it manifests its own tropes, its own sensibilities and styles, and its own identity and life. 

While very different, these spaces share a few characteristics. Against the prevailing orthodoxies of their time either in subject, form, content or materials, they all existed in an underground relation to the cultural mainstream. As pioneers looking for a greater freedom, many were vociferous in their criticism of the art worlds they were finding themselves in. 

Powered by Idealistic impulses transformed into pragmatic forces, they set to present work outside the established structures and create vital nexus with new peer groups. And yet it would seem that they all failed, in that they no longer exist. But to us, they are an Injunction to FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER. 

With fast and loose (my dead gallery), we bring back to you:

The Gallery (73-78)

2B Butler's Wharf (75-78)

the New Vision Centre (1956-65)
Signals (64-66)
London Free School (66)
Indica (65-67)

Arts Lab (67-69)
Gallery House (72-73)
The Gallery (73-78)
2B Butler's Wharf (75-78)
Fantasy Factory (75-93)
Art Meeting Place
B2 (80-82)
Network 21 (86)
Women Art Slides Library Journal(Women's Art Magazine / Make)
(85-2002)
Bank (91-99)
Workfortheeyetodo (93-98)

also featuring works from the neo-naturists, Rita Donagh, Stuart Brisley, Liz
Finch, John Hopkins and Sue Hall, Susan
Hiller, David Critchley, Alison Winckle ...