"In this humble yard our art boom was born, " Grayson Perry writes about Indica in the Times, October, 2006
"While the American art world was giving credence to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Indica was daring to show where art was going in the future. It was a special place," Yoko Ono, Harpers Bazaar, November, 2006
Part two of 'Riflemaker becomes Indica' opens on 8 January at the Riflkemaker Gallery on Beak Street in London. After a hugely successful Part One, the second part of the exhibition takes a look at the dawn of counter-culture in England and the role played by Indica Bookshop in its development.
At its original location in Mason's Yard, next door to White Cube's new West End gallery, Indica became a hub of the burgeoning counter-culture. As well as showing the most experimental art of the period the gallery was a kind of headquarters for 'agitprop' London. It then relocated to Southampton Row, where junkie novelist Alexander Trocchi occupied an office and Stuart Montgomery's Fulcrum poetry imprint lived alongside the script department of Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre. The basement also housed Europe's first underground newspaper, International Times (IT).
The bookshop operation was run by Miles, former manager of Better Books, who also sat on the committee for Gustav Metzger's Destruction In Art Symposium, the event which through the efforts of Mario Amaya brought Yoko Ono to London. The shop stocked the more esoteric items of the period - radical literature, concrete and beat poetry, small-press pamphlets, mimeo magazines, posters, Metzger's single-sheet DIAS manifesto, and had a 'box of records' on the counter - Sun Ra, the Fugs, Albert Ayler. Following its closure, members of staff went on to open the important Compendium bookstore.
Indica bookshop's influence carried through to the wave of well-meaning, often short-lived back street establishments of the seventies and eighties which sold anything from limited edition cassettes and flexidiscs to CND pamphlets, Pelican paperbacks and second-hand clothes and wholefoods - what might be called 'lifestyle' today. Its legacy is Time Out and NME, Oxfam, the ICA and Fresh & Wild, where it is sometimes still possible to catch a whiff of idealistic smoke.
Now more or less extinct, these shops and mail order outlets offered a network of protest which could be employed at short notice against any 'cause' - bomb culture and consumerism, Thatcherism, New Labour, poll tax and the Iraq war. In the past two years alone, six thousand small book and record-shops have closed in the United Kingdom.
John Dunbar and Marianne Faithfull
While the other Indica founder, John Dunbar, went on to temporarily curate exhibitions for the British Council, Miles became head of the Beatles' spoken word label Zapple, joined the editorial staff of Time Out and NME during their 70s and 80s heydays and became a bestselling author with his definitive biographies on William Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Paul McCartney and his own autobiographical chronicle of the times, 'In The Sixties' (Pimlico, 2002).
'Concept, Counterculture and the Indica Archive'
Part Two of Riflemaker becomes Indica
Monday 8 January - Saturday 24 February
Riflemaker
79 Beak Street
London W1F 9SU
T: +44 (0) 207 439 0000
Events at Riflemaker. To book tickets contact the gallery:
Monday 15 January
Bag One
Special event with Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund, founders of the artist group Janfamily, followed by Yoko Ono talking to John Dunbar.
Monday 22 January
The Op Art Revolution of Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesus Rafael Soto.
A talk and slideshow by the Venezuelan artist Jaime Gili with special guest Carlos Cruz-Diez.
Monday 29 January
Jazzetry and Performance
Four poets read simultaneously in an evening of cut-ups and word incest. Malgorzata Kitowski, James Byrne, Suzanne Andrade, Paul Taylor. With Pele Cox and 'psychedelic scholar' (c.Timothy Leary) Michael Horowitz
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