The Mutoid Waste Company was a performance arts group founded in the United Kingdom by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke in the early 1980s which continued until the 1990s, when it was based in Italy.
Influenced by the movie Mad Max and the popular Judge Dredd comics, they specialised in organising illegal parties in London throughout the 1980s, driven at first by eclectic assortments of fringe music such as psychedelic rock and dub reggae, but then embracing the burgeoning acid house music movement by the late 1980s. They were probably also influenced by the TV show Blake's 7, which featured Mutoids, reconditioned humans who had had their personalities removed.
The group became famous for building giant welded sculptures from waste materials and for customising broken down cars, as well as making large scale murals in the disused buildings where they held their parties.
In 1989, after a number of police raids on their warehouse in King's Cross, they left the country and travelled to Germany where they became notorious for building giant sculptures out of old machinery and car parts, one of which was a giant human figure, with a Volkswagen Beetle for its chest, doing a 'V-sign' over the Berlin Wall. They had a collection of scrap military vehicles including a Russian MiG 21 fighter aircraft!
These pioneers of art, performance and partying are still at it, based in Rimini (Italy) they continue to put on parties, transform environments, make sculptures and generally mutate anything they can get their hands on!
More here.
Expect a closer look into their work very soon.
