Art After the Destruction of Experience

One of the sites for the Destruction in Art Symposium organised by Gustav Metzger and John Latham in London in 1966 was a basement room beneath Better Books on Cecil Court. The Destruction in Art Symposium, or DIAS, was an attempt to wipe away art as it was known and replace it with something far more radical. The following year, the London Filmmaker's Coop was established in the same basement room suggesting that art had to be ended in order for the new time-based media practices to emerge in its wake. This article explores the connections between the brief and effervescent moment of the happenings movement in London and early experimental film in the UK.