Cosmic Love Wonder Lust: Documenting the Imperial Slacks Project

The large painted letters of Imperial Slacks, The Guy Pants Company, can still be seen on a brick building on Campbell Street, Surry Hills — a ghost sign marking one of the most generative periods in Sydney's recent art history. Between 1998 and 2002, the second floor of that building became home, studio, gallery, and social experiment for a loose collective of artists in their mid-twenties, fresh out of art school, who came to be known as the Slackers.

Cosmic Love Wonder Lust: The Imperial Slacks Project is the publication that documents this period and the 2015 retrospective exhibition held across Campbelltown Arts Centre and the Sydney College of the Arts Galleries. Co-curated by Michael Dagostino and Nicholas Tsoutas, and featuring essays by Alex Gawronski, Sally Breen, Blair French, Brianna Munting and Craig Judd alongside artists' texts, the book resists easy mythologising. As the curators write, the aim was critically focused on what made Imperial Slacks significant — not nostalgia, but analysis of how the collective redefined the artist-run space "from an environment that generates exhibitions and artifacts to something that generates actions and events."

Chris Fox's contribution traces both his practice within the building and the broader structural conditions that made Imperial Slacks possible — and ultimately unsustainable. "The gallery essentially provided a space for all of us to test ideas," Fox writes. "We all paid the rent to live there, which in turn subsidised part of the rent for the gallery." His essay moves between specific works — Contact (1998), Splint (2001–2002), Alimak (2000–2001), Studio 2 (2002) — and a wider reckoning with gentrification pressures that eventually displaced the collective: "The 'artists' studio loft' became part of the marketing to develop these warehouses and implement rents that became unaffordable to the artists themselves."

That double-bind — artists as both creative pioneers and inadvertent agents of displacement — remains as urgent now as it was when Imperial Slacks closed in 2002. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's concept of the Right to the City, Fox frames the warehouse occupation as something beyond pragmatic necessity: "there may have been elements of Lefebvre's experimental utopias as alternate possibilities for urban life... a rethinking of the use of the city within the existing structures, or perhaps more fundamentally a transforming and forging of a way of life."

The publication makes clear that what was lost was not just a space, but a particular form of collective life — irreverent, politically engaged, communally sustained — that Sydney has not managed to replicate.

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Cosmic Love Wonder Lust: The Imperial Slacks Project

Edited by Emma White

Authors: Michael Dagostino, Nicholas Tsoutas, Alex Gawronski, Sally Breen, Blair French, Brianna Munting & Craig Judd

Art Direction & Design: Simone Mandl

Published by Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-875199-97-6