Edited by Nav Haq Black Dog Publishing, 2016
In Nav Haq’s RAVE: Rave and Its Influence on Art and Culture, we get a decentralized portrait of a community of outsider insiders. The term “outsider insiders” may sound incongruous, but, as the reader learns, rave is founded upon myriad internal contradictions. Haq explains: “As a movement, [rave] enacted a desire to be autonomous, and possessed many other social facets… curiously embodying both dystopian and utopian impulses simultaneously, part neo-hippy romanticism, part blithe hedonism.”1 Encompassing first-person accounts, interviews, essays and extensive documentation of artist projects about rave, the book’s contents are decentralized in the sense of presenting necessarily divergent narratives of a complex and ongoing movement.
Haq, a curator at M HKA2 in Antwerp, explores rave’s post-industrial origins and its evolution, including…