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The Exploding Galaxy: Performance Art, LSD and Bent Coppers in the Sixties Counterculture
Originally published in 2014, under the name 99 Balls Pond The Story of The Exploding Galaxy, this memoir is one of very few accounts by the women who witnessed London’s sixties counterculture. The English hippie movement has been largely seen through the prism of male ambitions and male memories. In this book Drower evokes the spirit of the time, with all its innocence, its hopes for the world, its contradictions and its glaring hypocrisies.
This story of the flower children is relevant to those studying art history, the sixties counterculture, the emergence of feminism, cultural studies or anthropology.
...... Yoko Ono, Jimi Hendrix, Sergeant Pepper, The Cream, Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, UFO, The Soft Machine, The 14-hour Technicolor Dream, David Medalla, The Liverpool Poets, the Legalise Pot Rally, Oz Magazine, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg.......
This story of the flower children is relevant to those studying art history, the sixties counterculture, the emergence of feminism, cultural studies or anthropology.
...... Yoko Ono, Jimi Hendrix, Sergeant Pepper, The Cream, Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, UFO, The Soft Machine, The 14-hour Technicolor Dream, David Medalla, The Liverpool Poets, the Legalise Pot Rally, Oz Magazine, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg.......
386 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 17, 2021
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January 19, 2024
This book is a monumental achievement and one that should be a reference book in every art college library. As someone who experienced the Exploding Galaxy in its heyday and has taken part in artists collectives ever since - an interest that culminated in a doctoral study of one of those collectives at the RCA completed in 2002; it is with something of an experts eye that I come to this recommendation and judgement. Having said that Jill Drower’s book is also of use to people who might have a more general interest in the counterculture of the Sixties in London. She was one of the youngest members of Exploding Galaxy and in her own description a ‘weekend hippy’, so this is an account of a participant observer but one who kept one foot in a more stable world. She provides a female gaze that is disarmingly honest about those times. Her writing is not the usual stilted academic style and is both enjoyably eloquent and thorough, both on the level of personal reminiscence and in describing the wider contexts. The authority of her account is backed up with detailed research including many interviews with past participants. The concluding chapter of ‘evaluation’ that assembles statements from eighteen of the participants reflects the inclusive ethos of the Galaxy.
The Exploding Galaxy was one of my main artistic inspirations as a young hippy student at Portsmouth School of Architecture who was quick to visit the Arts Lab when it opened in Drury lane, London in 1967 - so this book brought back many memories of those heady days. The Galaxy, as they were fondly known, embodied an idealism and feeling of freedom from the straight jacket of the establishment culture that I was facing as a young adult. Looking back the Galaxy are one of the most important and uncompromising cultural groups of the London Sixties underground, even if they were short lived.
For younger people the book is so rich and detailed that I think Jill Drower’s book will be an engrossing trip back to that time. The sharp relief between the forces of the establishment or ‘straight society’ and this commune of hippy artists will be at times shocking and extreme to those who have not experienced such polarisation.
The Galaxy made a radical break with consumerist values and the gallery based art market. It was like experiencing a new culture being born before your eyes - their ‘Explorations’ were live workshops of creativity which valued the wonder of the creative moment that unfolded rather than any slick end production. They were unique at the time for the reason that at core they were led by two extraordinary artists David Medalla (Born 1942 in the Philippines) and Gerry Fitzgerald, of a similar age, who was an Irish painter. Paul Keiller provided them with a house at 99 Balls Pond Road in which they could live rent free; although it had no electricity or running hot water! They had no arts grants and little income. Few of them were receiving state benefit, but there were some friends around who could provide the occasional meals or hot baths. In spite of Paul Keiller’s efforts at banning drugs from the house the police raided the house and planted drugs on the premises. The resulting court cases are dramatically described. It was clear that the state was determined to stamp out any such an anarchic cultural challenge.
The two leaders seemed able to channel the energy of the commune of a dozen or two younger people to move right outside the modes and expectations of the Western ‘death’ culture, to the extent of developing their own forms of writing and terminology. This uncompromising rejection of the terms of Western contemporary art is still an inspiration for me. Medalla made it in the Art World whereas Fitzgerald is not so well known. Medalla was a people person, Fitz was uncompromising about the ‘centroclinal’ world of war and the need for an expansive ‘quaquaversal’ universe of love and creativity he was demonstrating.
What I particularly like about Jill Drower’s book is that it is a warts and all look at the Sixties hippie counterculture. You get a female view of the male elite of the hippy in-crowd. It has often been this elite that have written the history of the Sixties. Here we have a refreshing view of a participant observer who was both immersed and critical. She is very honest about the number of participants with privileged backgrounds but for me any aloofness from individuals was counteracted by the openness of the collective, which contrasted so strongly with the glass ceiling I felt as a working class arts student. When I brought out my first Survival Scrapbook in 1972 and it was a best seller for a while, I had expected to be received into the hippy in-crowd. But no such invitations appeared. I realised just what a closed shop it was. So much like the upper classes.
The Exploding Galaxy had been invited down to the Portsmouth Arts Workshop that I organised in 1967 and ’68. Jerry Fitzgerald and his partner Umiak had stayed at my flat and impressed on me their Transmedia philosophy in long monologues. Later in the Seventies I participated in David Medalla and John Dugger’s Artists for Democracy events.
One of the odd crossovers with my experience in the book was David Curtis who programmed the films at the Arts Lab, where I watched some of the long Warhol films lying on mattresses on the floor of the cinema. David Curtis, still married to Biddy Pippin the Arts Lab in-house artist, later became one of my external examiners when I did my PhD on Exploding Cinema, another open counter cultural collective.
This is inevitably quite a personal review because of my connections with the Galaxy at the time. For younger generations I’d say that Drower’s book is the most raw and honest access to reading about the most creative, idealistic and exciting end of the Sixties counter culture.
“Every time they have been vanguard women – and they have been vanguard women going back to the 12th century – they were buried from us. The women that we could have seen as examples were hidden, were taken out of the canon. It's the moment it gets written up…. The minute it gets written up, the women are excluded. I don't call it a forgivable lapse. I call it wilful exclusion.” Caroline Coon, p. 134
https://play.google.com/store/audiobo...
The Exploding Galaxy was one of my main artistic inspirations as a young hippy student at Portsmouth School of Architecture who was quick to visit the Arts Lab when it opened in Drury lane, London in 1967 - so this book brought back many memories of those heady days. The Galaxy, as they were fondly known, embodied an idealism and feeling of freedom from the straight jacket of the establishment culture that I was facing as a young adult. Looking back the Galaxy are one of the most important and uncompromising cultural groups of the London Sixties underground, even if they were short lived.
For younger people the book is so rich and detailed that I think Jill Drower’s book will be an engrossing trip back to that time. The sharp relief between the forces of the establishment or ‘straight society’ and this commune of hippy artists will be at times shocking and extreme to those who have not experienced such polarisation.
The Galaxy made a radical break with consumerist values and the gallery based art market. It was like experiencing a new culture being born before your eyes - their ‘Explorations’ were live workshops of creativity which valued the wonder of the creative moment that unfolded rather than any slick end production. They were unique at the time for the reason that at core they were led by two extraordinary artists David Medalla (Born 1942 in the Philippines) and Gerry Fitzgerald, of a similar age, who was an Irish painter. Paul Keiller provided them with a house at 99 Balls Pond Road in which they could live rent free; although it had no electricity or running hot water! They had no arts grants and little income. Few of them were receiving state benefit, but there were some friends around who could provide the occasional meals or hot baths. In spite of Paul Keiller’s efforts at banning drugs from the house the police raided the house and planted drugs on the premises. The resulting court cases are dramatically described. It was clear that the state was determined to stamp out any such an anarchic cultural challenge.
The two leaders seemed able to channel the energy of the commune of a dozen or two younger people to move right outside the modes and expectations of the Western ‘death’ culture, to the extent of developing their own forms of writing and terminology. This uncompromising rejection of the terms of Western contemporary art is still an inspiration for me. Medalla made it in the Art World whereas Fitzgerald is not so well known. Medalla was a people person, Fitz was uncompromising about the ‘centroclinal’ world of war and the need for an expansive ‘quaquaversal’ universe of love and creativity he was demonstrating.
What I particularly like about Jill Drower’s book is that it is a warts and all look at the Sixties hippie counterculture. You get a female view of the male elite of the hippy in-crowd. It has often been this elite that have written the history of the Sixties. Here we have a refreshing view of a participant observer who was both immersed and critical. She is very honest about the number of participants with privileged backgrounds but for me any aloofness from individuals was counteracted by the openness of the collective, which contrasted so strongly with the glass ceiling I felt as a working class arts student. When I brought out my first Survival Scrapbook in 1972 and it was a best seller for a while, I had expected to be received into the hippy in-crowd. But no such invitations appeared. I realised just what a closed shop it was. So much like the upper classes.
The Exploding Galaxy had been invited down to the Portsmouth Arts Workshop that I organised in 1967 and ’68. Jerry Fitzgerald and his partner Umiak had stayed at my flat and impressed on me their Transmedia philosophy in long monologues. Later in the Seventies I participated in David Medalla and John Dugger’s Artists for Democracy events.
One of the odd crossovers with my experience in the book was David Curtis who programmed the films at the Arts Lab, where I watched some of the long Warhol films lying on mattresses on the floor of the cinema. David Curtis, still married to Biddy Pippin the Arts Lab in-house artist, later became one of my external examiners when I did my PhD on Exploding Cinema, another open counter cultural collective.
This is inevitably quite a personal review because of my connections with the Galaxy at the time. For younger generations I’d say that Drower’s book is the most raw and honest access to reading about the most creative, idealistic and exciting end of the Sixties counter culture.
“Every time they have been vanguard women – and they have been vanguard women going back to the 12th century – they were buried from us. The women that we could have seen as examples were hidden, were taken out of the canon. It's the moment it gets written up…. The minute it gets written up, the women are excluded. I don't call it a forgivable lapse. I call it wilful exclusion.” Caroline Coon, p. 134
https://play.google.com/store/audiobo...
Displaying 1 of 1 review