The Revolutionary Suicide Mechanised Regiment Band, Part 2

Alexandra Bircken, Derek Boshier & Christopher Logue, Jacqueline de Jong, Barry Flanagan, Poul Gernes, Dale Jackson, Allison Katz, Jim Lambie, Christopher Maclaine, Oliver Osborne, Dieter Roth, Emily Mae Smith

In 1955 Robert Fraser was conscripted into the King’s African Rifles in Kampala, Uganda. Here it is said he embarked upon an unlikely love affair with his regimental Sergeant Major: Idi Amin Dada. Upon Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1961 the Rifles were disbanded and four years later Amin became Commander of the Ugandan Army whilst Fraser returned to London to become an art dealer. In 1971 Amin seized the country’s Presidency from Milton Obote in a coup. He subsequently appointed himself ‘Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular’, offered his services as King of Scotland and plotted (unrealised) invasions of South Africa and Israel. Meanwhile Fraser had become London’s pre-eminent dealer of contemporary art, hosting exhibitions by Kenneth Anger, Derek Boshier, Gilbert & George, John Lennon, Rene Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg, Bridget Riley and Andy Warhol amongst many others. His arrest (with Mick Jagger) for possession of heroin was imortalised by Richard Hamilton (‘Swingeing London ‘67’, 1968-9) and he art-directed the cover of The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, 1967 (with Peter Blake and Jan Haworth).

The Revolutionary Suicide Regiment Band, Amin’s bastardised military band – a jazz ensemble with go-go dancers – was in some ways the antithesis of Sgt. Peppers’. This exhibition is an appropriately discordant assembly of exuberant non-sequitors.