By Miruna Tiberiu
For those who have strolled down the streets of Shoreditch, past the swathes of fashion students standing outside designer vintage shops, on the hunt for the least overpriced coffee in a two-mile radius, the idea that East London once looked completely different seems almost mythical. The area’s past lives are felt by their ghostly presence, superimposed, as the ever-changing city shape-shifts once more. Its histories, too, permeate through these streets. Turning to these past lives precisely, and perfectly timed for this year’s LGBT+ history month, Richard Squires and Emily Richardson embark on their latest collaborative project; a jubilee exhibition in the name of the grassroots queer art event they hosted in Shoreditch in 1998. JUST COPING 25 sees the coming together of a queer artist community on the margins 25 years ago, remembered today through an intimate and powerful archival exhibition.
On the 19th of August 1998, the Shoreditch bar 333 was temporarily taken over by a group of troublemaker artists hungry to show their queer art to the world – starting with East London. The result was JUST COPING.
To the organisers of JUST COPING, Shoreditch in the late ‘90s was a glorious and terrifying place. Unknowingly at the time, the event perhaps became caught up in these changing tides and confused visions of the future spurred on by the birth of Tony Blair’s New Labour. The organisers, all regulars to the neighbourhood, remember with a shudder the Lads Lads Lads culture which they ran away from at all costs. Britpop, Young British Artists, Cool Britannia, and the ‘commercialisation of culture’ seemed to fill London’s art scene. Things were about to change, however. In the same space, ‘Gayditch’ was about to be born, together with its electrifying club circuit and cult house parties. JUST COPING, in some ways, marked this start.
Kiki performing, JUST COPING at 333 Shoreditch. Credits to Nicola Levinsky.
The pop-up art event showcased the sheer creativity of a group of young queer artists who wanted to draw the excitement from the feeling of ‘just coping’ in their 20s. Squires and Richardson, at the time freshly graduated from art school, where they had met and struck up what would become a life-long friendship and artistic partnership, shouted to the power of DIY. Chucking to one side the rejection letter for their funding application, they decided to make things work their own way. What emerged was a collage of sorts, with contributions from underground artists from across the UK and the US.
The night featured an exhilarating performance from American cabaret starts Kiki & Herb (Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman), captured almost in its entirety in video and photography alike. With no budget, the pair relied on the mutual excitement of queer artists around them and the benefit of the doubt from others to make their ‘artistic house of horrors’ come to life. They miraculously managed to secure two free plane tickets to fly Bond and Mellman out from the States, bring together James B. L. Hollands and Tom Stephen to DJ, as well as collaborate with future Electroclash sweetheart Fil Ok as composer.
The group was united by a cool unseriousness and desire to poke fun at the ridiculous happenings of that late ‘90s atmosphere in London. Hollands writes, ‘I tried to play songs that summed up the feeling of desperation I had at the time. I remember Kiki and Herb doing Running Up That Hill’. The event needed a mascot, of course. Squires and Richardson concocted the perfect match: a ‘guerilla ice cream vendor’ wearing luscious false lashes, a wig that would make Lady Di jealous, and a stocking over her head, brought to you by performance artist Emma Wilson-Troy. The night featured everything, from Squires’ and Richardson’s experimental films screened in various cramped rooms to a soundtrack composed by Fil Ok specifically for the toilets. Whilst most of the participants of JUST COPING admit that they don’t remember much of the night, they all recall feeling messy and alive.
Time Out Preview of JUST COPING, 1998. Credits to author.
As you wander through the VFD Gallery transformed for JUST COPING 25, you can almost live for yourself the moment it commemorates. Rare is it for an underground event to be so well documented. It is as if the original contributors anticipated that today’s generation of queer people would feel the resounding lack of means to remember, even to momentarily experience, how their past counterparts lived on the same streets, with the same dreams and lifestyles and drive to do exactly what they’re told not to. The archival and preservation work showcased by JUST COPING is undoubtedly praiseworthy. A nonchalant pinboard houses silly and serious conversations through letters between the event organisers and those who pitched in their help, cutouts from queer newspapers that no longer exist and zines galore, at your disposal as you piece together the trail of hilarious, occasionally touching, coincidences and acts of goodwill that made the event possible. Photography from the original night takes up the gallery’s walls: of Kiki & Herb and the DJs but also of those who attended, dressed up and sweaty, mesmerised by the sensuous cabaret performances or smirking at the camera with a glint in their eyes as they pose suavely. This lens on the crowd is a highlight of the exhibition. They look like a community who is just coping and having a blast while they’re at it.
Faced with this collection of material standing as proof of a community in the margins, who may not have ended up in the Hall of Fame but who was just as creative and exciting as the ‘greats’ of the ‘90s art world, Squires and Richardson recall realising ‘the importance of documenting our own queer histories’. This jubilee celebration began, they write, with their decision to donate this archive to the Bishopsgate Institute. During this year’s LGBT+ History Month, JUST COPING 25 stands less as an attempt to reminisce on the past during the not-so-positive present, and more as a celebration of a queer community in an ever-morphing city who came together to prove that making art is not reserved for the wealthy, the socialites, or the pretentious. As the pair write in their introductory notes to the exhibition, ‘JUST COPING 25 offers a reminder of how grass roots, DIY arts organising, motivated by enthusiasm and ingenuity, rather than money and status, can create unexpected, hybrid experiences; moments of irreverent pleasure and community; surprising dialogues and the formation of new and lasting relationships’.
So, JUST COPING 25 is here for you to experience at the VFD Gallery in London every weekend this February. Come down to Dalston to listen to muffled recordings and watch shaky, delicious, footage of Kiki & Herb’s numbers. And don’t forget to grab yourself a fanzine as you leave.
Miruna Tiberiu is the Editor-in-Chief of GAY45. She is a student at Cambridge University. Tiberiu has written for numerous publications, including The Cambridge Review of Books, and the Cambridge Language Collective. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Cambridge’s first all-queer magazine, Screeve. Tiberiu was longlisted for the International News Media Association (INMA)’s “30 Under 30” Awards 2023.
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