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ART & DESIGN
A History of the Now, Found in Politically Charged
Objects
Victoria and Albert Museum Pushes Boundaries of Collecting
By RACHEL DONADIO JULY 6, 2014
LONDON A pair of Primark cargo shorts made at a Bangladeshi sweatshop that
collapsed last year, killing more than 1,100 people. The first 3-D printed handgun.
An Occupy Sandy sign made by grass-roots organizers in New York after
Hurricane Sandy.
These are among the objects going on view this month at the Victoria and
Albert Museum here in separate exhibitions that push the boundaries of museum
collecting and design. Rapid Response Collecting, which opened this past
weekend, offers a new approach to how museums codify contemporary items as
historical, while Disobedient Objects, which is to open on July 26, showcases
material made by social movements worldwide.
The exhibitions operate like agents provocateurs inside the Victoria and
Albert, Britains pre-eminent applied art and design museum, challenging visitors
to rethink their relationship to everyday objects and consider the human costs
behind items from mass-produced clothing to electronic cigarettes. The
exhibitions also prompt a reconsideration of the social history of other items in the
museums august collection.
Design isnt always about nice tables and beautiful chairs, Martin Roth, the
museums director, said in a telephone interview last week. All those objects
really belong to everyone, thats the amazing part of it, so what were doing right
now is to bring the discussion from outside the museum inside the museum.
Rapid-response collecting represents a new strategy for the museum. The
objects are chosen by four curators hired last year in the contemporary
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architecture, design and digital department, with a mandate to bring items of
timely relevance into the permanent collection quickly. The four discuss and vet
the objects, looking for items that tell a larger story about our time.
Corinna Gardner, the curator of contemporary product design and rapid-
response collecting at the Victoria and Albert, said that there had always been
something of the country home about the museum, which is most famous for its
William Morris textiles and its tea sets, and that the rapid-response initiative was
a way to broaden the collection beyond work by professional designers.
Its about finding a way for us to act, for the museum, thats timely and in
response to whats happening in the world around us, Ms. Gardner said. Its
about us looking outward to see how events, important things that happen, are
articulated in the field of design, or how those objects are part of that change.
The first 12 items on view in what will be a continuing rotation and can be
found on the museums public online database include black cargo pants made
for the Primark clothing brand at the Rana Plaza workshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh,
which collapsed in April 2013, killing more than 1,100 people and generating
outrage about working conditions in the garment industry. (Primark provided the
pants for the exhibition and confirmed their provenance.)
Also on view is an Ikea stuffed wolf tossed last December by anti-government
protesters at Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kongs most senior political official, whose
nickname is the Wolf, and stilettos donated by the French shoemaker Christian
Louboutin in various shades of nude to reflect the skin tones of different races.
One case holds the Liberator, the first 3-D printed gun, made in 2013 in Texas
by Cody Wilson, a libertarian law student who posted the design for the gun on his
website until the United States government ordered him to remove it. The gun, the
curators write, transforms the way we think about new manufacturing
technologies and the unregulated sharing of designs online.
By adding mass-produced items into its permanent collection and calling
attention to sweatshop conditions behind some products, the Victoria and Albert
is also taking a stance on what items it considers historical making rapid-
response collecting inevitably political. But the curators say they arent trying to be
polemical.
The key thing is that we want the visitors to have the freedom of their
imagination to draw their own conclusions about this object, Kieran Long, the
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museums senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital, said
about the 3-D gun.
As for the Primark pants, or a set of false eyelashes endorsed by the pop star
Katy Perry and handmade by women in Indonesia, what I want the visitors to
experience is the moment where they can take a position around a very complex
issue like globalized manufacturing or the impact of technology on all our lives,
Mr. Long added.
Other museums are taking notice. The Museum of Modern Art in New York
included the 3-D gun in an online debate, Design and Violence. Sebastian Chan,
the director of digital and emerging media at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian
Design Museum, in New York, called rapid-response collecting a bold move that
opens up a new way for the museum to engage the public in the social and
political context of the designed products and services in the world around them.
He added that when the Cooper Hewitt reopens in December after a renovation, it
will have space for our own rapid-response initiatives and we will be watching the
V&As work closely.
Rapid response isnt the Victoria and Alberts only experiment in politically
engaged collecting. Disobedient Objects, an exhibition of 99 items selected from
protest movements over the past three decades will be on view until Feb. 1. Almost
all of the items are on loan from participants involved in the movements and wont
join the museums permanent collection.
The show includes papier-mch and cardboard puppets made by the Bread
and Puppet theater in Vermont to protest the first Iraq war, buttons from the
1980s in solidarity with an imprisoned Nelson Mandela and Silence = Death
posters from the AIDS activists Act Up.
They are also putting on view a balloonlike inflatable silver cobblestone, a
symbol of protest since the 19th century that was made in 2012 and used in
demonstrations from Berlin to Barcelona, turning interactions between protesters
and the police into a kind of political theater.
The exhibition isnt a canon, or a final word, said Gavin Grindon, a visiting
research fellow at the museum. Its an invitation to start thinking about social
movements. Mr. Grindon and Catherine Flood, a Victoria and Albert curator of
prints, organized the show.
The curators have also created a blog, with downloadable how-to guides,
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showing instructions for making a shield in the form of a book and a tear-gas mask
out of a plastic bottle.
Some might balk at such a politically charged exhibition at a publicly funded
institution, but the curators at the Victoria and Albert say the museum has had a
long history of socially engaged collecting, and today they see part of its mission as
exploring the design of social movements and the social history of everyday
objects.
Its there, its out in the streets, so why dont we discuss it in here? Mr. Roth
said. It doesnt mean that we think the same way. It doesnt mean that we support
these kinds of movements. Its a platform for debate.
A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2014, on page C1 of the New York edition with the
headline: A History of the Now, Found in Politically Charged Objects.
2014 The New York Times Company
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