Design Objects and The Museum 9781472577238, 9781472577221, 9781474268820, 9781472577245

Citation preview

DESIGN OBJECTS AND THE MUSEUM

i

ii

DESIGN OBJECTS AND THE MUSEUM

Edited by Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

iii

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Selection and Editorial Material: Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell, 2016 © Individual Chapters: their Authors, 2016 Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : PB : ePDF : ePub:

978-1-4725-7723-8 978-14725-7722-1 978-14725-7724-5 978-14725-7725-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Design objects and the museum / edited by Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-7723-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4725-7722-1 (paperback) 1. Decorative arts—Collectors and collecting. 2. Design—History—20th century. 3. Design—History—21st century. 4. Art museums—Social aspects. 5. Museums—Curatorship. I. Farrelly, Liz, editor. II . Weddell, Joanna, editor. NK 1390.D49 2016 745.074—dc23 2015020314 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Preface Jonathan M. Woodham Acknowledgements Introduction Joanna Weddell and Liz Farrelly Part I 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Canon and Design in the Museum

Exhibiting ‘The Taste of Everyday Things’: Kenneth Clark and CEMA’s Wartime Exhibitions of Design Sue Breakell

3

The Ethos of the Victoria and Albert Museum Circulation Department 1947–1960 Joanna Weddell

15

‘I Would Suggest that You Should Not Think of the Design Centre as a Museum; It is a Live, Active, Moving Thing’: Designs of the Year, 1957 Ness Wood

27

Designing for a New Nigeria: Hayes Textiles Limited and the British Manufacture of Gele in the Postcolonial Period Nicola Stylianou

41

Towards an Uncensored History of Design: Ideal Homes and Constance Spry at the Design Museum, London Deborah Sugg Ryan

51

Ghosts and Dancers: Immaterials and the Museum

61

Part II 7

vii ix xii xvi xvii

Jana Scholze

Positioning Design within and beyond the Museum

Indian Living Cultures: Collected, Exhibited and Performed Megha Rajguru and Nicola Ashmore

73

8

Triennale Design Museum: An Evolving Curatorial Project

83

9

Gallery Envy and Contingent Autonomy: Exhibiting Design Art Damon Taylor

Virginia Lucarelli

10 Contemporary Designers, Cultural Diplomacy and the Museum without Walls Gareth Williams 11 Curating Critical Design: An Embodied Criticality Gillian Russell Part III

91 97 105

Interpretation and the Challenge of Design

12 Design, Politics and Museum Presentation

Marianne Lamonaca

115

v

Contents

13 You Are Here, We Are There: Tracing NID’s Design Histories

Tom Wilson

14 Just What Is it that Makes Curating Design so Different, so Appealing?

Helen Charman

127 137

15 Design and Museum Interpretation: Contemporary Characteristics and Practice Jason Cleverly

149

16 Interactions in the Museum: Design Culture Salons at the Victoria and Albert Museum Leah Armstrong and Guy Julier

159

17 Museums Online and Digital: Some Innovations and Implications

169

Liz Farrelly

Closing Comments Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell

181

Index

183

vi

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1

Design in the Home, exhibition leaflet, CEMA /V&A, 1943

5

1.2

Exhibition catalogue for Design at Home: an exhibition of furniture and furnishings, Arts Council of Great Britain/CEMA , National Gallery, 1945. Front cover

7

1.3

‘Bachelor bed-sitting room’, from the exhibition catalogue for Design at Home: an exhibition of furniture and furnishings, Arts Council of Great Britain/CEMA , National Gallery, 1945

10

2.1

History of Lithography at Bolton Art Gallery, September 1950

17

2.2

Contemporary Scandinavian Furnishing Fabrics at Manchester Regional College of Art, September 1956

19

2.3

‘English Chintz’, Section IV, The Last Fifty Years 1910–1960 at the V&A, 1960

22

3.1

Designs of the Year, the Design Centre, London, 1957

29

3.2

Visitors to the Design Centre, 1957

30

3.3

The report of the final selection, 9 April 1957

32

4.1

Sample for a gele, Hayes Textiles Limited, jacquard woven rayon, T.129:1–2000, Victoria and Albert Museum

46

Sample swatch for a gele showing the ‘Bearskin pattern’, Hayes Textiles Limited, jacquard woven rayon, T.124–2000, Victoria and Albert Museum

47

Sample swatch for a gele designed to imitate West African narrow strip weaving, Hayes Textiles Limited, jacquard woven rayon, T.117–2000, Victoria and Albert Museum

48

5.1

View of Ideal Homes, Design Museum, 1993

54

5.2

‘The back of the kitchen drawer’, Ideal Homes, Design Museum, 1993

55

5.3

Reconstruction of the parlour of the 1951 Women’s Institute House, Ideal Homes, Design Museum, 1993

56

6.1

Liam Young/Tomorrows Thoughts Today, Electronic Countermeasures

64

6.2

Thomas Lommée, OpenStructures, first campaign images representing component-thinking instead of object-thinking, 2009

65

Hindu Shrine deities dressed in hand-crafted outfits made by the Hindu Women’s Group and Hindu Elders’ Group, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2010

74

7.2

The Hindu Shrine exhibit, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2010

74

7.3

Hindu Shrine and deities, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2010

75

8.1

‘Super-Comfort’ section, What is Italian Design? The Seven Obsessions, curator Andrea Branzi, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 2007–09

85

4.2 4.3

7.1

vii

Illustrations

8.2 8.3

Exhibition view, The Things We Are, curator Alessandro Mendini, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 2010–11

86

‘Cucina Sambonet’ installation dedicated to Roberto Sambonet, curator Studio Formafantasma, Design: The Syndrome of Influence, curator Pierluigi Nicolin, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 2013–14

89

10.1 Rijksmuseum Schiphol publicity, 2014

100

10.2 Mauricio Affonso taking part in the Opening Ceremony, London 2012 Olympic Games, 2012

102

11.1 Building Site and Road, Risk Centre, Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, 2013

108

11.2 Internet Café and Town Square, Risk Centre, Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, 2013

109

12.1 Presentation casket to Queen Victoria for the Diamond Jubilee, 1897; Gwendoline Buckler, Della Robbia Pottery Ltd., Birkenhead, England, Lead-glazed earthenware (55.2 × 46.0 cm dia), The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection, TD 1989.49.3 a,b

117

12.2 Figurine, Hitler Jugend Trommler [Hitler Youth Drummer], c. 1937; Glazed porcelain (26.7 × 14.6 × 10.2 cm), 85.7.274.1. with Figurine, Bund Deutscher Mädel [League of German Girls], c. 1937; Glazed porcelain (30.8 × 8.9 × 8.9 cm), 85.7.274.2.; Richard Förster, Porzellan Manufaktur Allach, Allach and Dachau, Germany; The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

119

12.3 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (installation view), The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, 25 November 2011–26 March 2012

123

13.1 You Are Here: NID Traces, 2013, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

127

13.2 You Are Here: NID Traces, 2013, Metal Workshop with Sind Bicycle by Singanpalli Balaram, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

128

13.3 You Are Here: NID Traces, 2013, Woodwork Workshop with chair produced to scheme by George Nakashima, c.1964, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

134

14.1 Pencil paused at 60%, In the Making, curator Barber Osgerby, Design Museum, London, 2014

140

14.2 Comments board and visitors, Designs of the Year 2014, Design Museum, London

142

14.3 Paul Smith studio installation, Hello My Name is Paul Smith, Design Museum, London, 2013–14

145

15.1 Interactive Worktable and Escritoire, Dr Johnson’s House, 2009

153

15.2 The Enlightened Eye, Liskeard and District Museum, 2014

155

15.3 Annotated mineral image made on The Enlightened Eye, Liskeard and District Museum, 2014

156

16.1 Design Culture Salon 15: How does design address immobilities in our society? Panel, left to right: Dr Ana Carden-Coyne, Carmen Papalia, James Stewart, Dr Graham Pullin, Alison Thompson and Professor Rob Imrie, V&A, 13.3. 2105

160

Table 16.1 Summary of the topics of debate at the first three series of the Design Culture Salons

viii

163

CONTRIBUTORS

Leah Armstrong (University of Brighton and Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Dr Armstrong is University of Brighton/Victoria and Albert Museum Research Officer in Contemporary Design Culture. In 2013 she completed an AHRC -funded Collaborative Doctoral Award with the University of Brighton Design Archives and the Chartered Society of Designers titled ‘Designing a Profession: The Structure, Organisation and Identity of the Design Profession in Britain, 1930–2010’. In 2012 Leah curated Portraits: Women Designers for Designing Women at the London Fashion and Textiles Museum, in collaboration with the University of Brighton Design Archives. Nicola Ashmore (University of Brighton) Dr Ashmore is a visual artist and Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She has published on curatorial practice in Etapes: Design and Visual Culture; the Journal of Museum Ethnography and the Journal of Curatorial Studies. Nicola is currently involved in a collective project, remaking Picasso’s Guernica as a protest banner. Through remakings and interventions in found materials she continues to investigate and illuminate how meaning is constructed and held in material form. Her research interests include curatorial practice, artistic interventions and cultural policies. Sue Breakell (University of Brighton) Sue Breakell is Senior Research Fellow of the University of Brighton and Archivist at the University of Brighton Design Archives. She has worked extensively in visual arts archives, including as head of Tate Archive and at the Imperial War Museum. Her research engages with the nature, meaning and practice of archives, and midtwentieth-century art and design through archives. She is editor of a special issue of the journal Archives and Records on the subject of visual arts archives, published in 2015. Helen Charman (Design Museum, London) Dr Charman is Director of Learning and Research at the Design Museum, London and was previously Senior Curator of Education at Tate Modern. Jason Cleverly (Falmouth University) Jason Cleverly is Senior Lecturer for Contemporary Crafts at Falmouth University. He has developed a series of situational, interpretive sculptural craft works for museums and art galleries, exhibited nationally and internationally and designed works to engender collaboration and co-participation; these artefacts attempt to enhance visitor experiences by promoting informal learning. Many of these projects are developed in collaboration with social scientists at King’s College London. Jason’s PhD presents a critical evaluation of this situated design practice. Liz Farrelly (University of Brighton and Design Museum, London) Liz Farrelly writes and edits books and articles about design and popular culture, as well as curating and lecturing on design and visual culture. She has worked on staff at Blueprint, Eye and Étapes magazines and as commissioning editor for book publishers in the UK, Europe and the US. She has taught across a range of design disciplines and currently lectures in Cultural and Critical Studies at the University of Brighton. Liz is

ix

Contributors

an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award candidate researching the future of design museums with a focus on the Design Museum, London. Guy Julier (University of Brighton and Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Professor Julier is the University of Brighton/Victoria and Albert Museum Professor of Design Culture, developing and running a research programme that addresses contemporary issues in design, linking the museum, the university and professionals in the creative design industries. Marianne Lamonaca (Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York) Marianne Lamonaca is Associate Gallery Director and Chief Curator at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture. Prior to this she served as Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Education at The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach where she was responsible for the interpretation and care of the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. Virginia Lucarelli (Politecnico di Milano) Virginia Lucarelli is completing a doctorate in Design at the Politecnico di Milano. Her current research investigates museum collections and the market for collectable design. Megha Rajguru (University of Brighton) Dr Rajguru is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She has published on museum intervention artistic practices in the Journal of Visual Arts Practice and the Journal of Museum Ethnography. Megha’s postdoctoral research studies postcolonial identities performed in public spheres with a focus on South Asian people’s migration experiences through material and visual culture analyses and oral histories. She is also an arts practitioner working in video, sculpture and textile and has exhibited her work in India, the UK and the US . Gillian Russell (Royal College of Art, London) Gillian Russell is a doctoral candidate in Design Products at the Royal College of Art, London. Her research addresses the relationship between emerging design practice and museums, and is being undertaken as part of an AHRC -funded Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is co-founder of the design think tank DeTnk.com, and since 2006 has been Senior Tutor in the MA Curating Contemporary Design Programme at Kingston University, London (run in partnership with the Design Museum, London). Jana Scholze (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Dr Scholze is Curator of Contemporary Furniture and Product Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is also Exhibitions Review Editor for the journal Design and Culture. Nicola Stylianou (Open University) Dr Stylianou was awarded her PhD in 2013 for research into the little known African textile collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her PhD was funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award between the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN ) at the University of the Arts London and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She currently works as a Research Assistant at the Open University. Deborah Sugg Ryan (Falmouth University) Dr Sugg Ryan is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Design at Falmouth University. She started her career as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and also worked for the Design Museum as a guest curator. Deborah writes on the design and material culture of the home, as well as the spectacle of commercial exhibitions x

Contributors

and pageants in twentieth-century Britain. She was a British Academy Mid-Career Research Fellow in 2012– 2013. A revised edition of her book on the Ideal Home Show (Hazar 1997) is published by Media 10 in 2015. Damon Taylor (University of Brighton) Dr Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Design at the University of Brighton. He has a BA in Design History from Staffordshire University, a Masters degree in Cultural Studies from Leeds University and his PhD, Design Art Furniture and the Boundaries of Function: Communicative Objects and Performative Things, was awarded by University College Falmouth in collaboration with University of the Arts London. He has worked at a range of leading institutions across the sector and for three years was head of Historical and Critical Studies at Buckinghamshire New University. He was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Industrial Design Engineering at Technical University Delft in the Netherlands, and as well as being a teacher he is also a writer and performer. Joanna Weddell (University of Brighton and Victoria and Albert Museum, London) Joanna Weddell has a background in architecture and is currently researching post-war design and museology at the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of Brighton (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award); she also teaches History of Art. Gareth Williams Gareth Williams is a writer, educator and curator, and until 2014 was Senior Tutor in Design Products and Reader in Design Curating at the Royal College of Art. Formerly Gareth was Curator of Furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His latest book is, Design: An Essential Introduction, London: Goodman Fiell/Design Museum (2015). Tom Wilson (University of Brighton, Design Museum, London and British Council) Tom Wilson is Head of Collection and Research at the Design Museum, London. He is completing an AHRCfunded collaborative doctorate at the University of Brighton and the Design Museum, researching the design and display strategies of the Commonwealth Institute in London. In August 2013 Tom was Curator in Residence at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad as part of the British Council’s Design Curation Programme in India. Ness Wood (University of Brighton) Ness Wood is a design historian and practitioner. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Brighton with the research title Green Shield Stamps: an investigation into consumer loyalty, thrift and the domestic economy. Her BA dissertation on the manufacturer Hille was awarded both the Design History Society and the Association of Art Historians’ Essay Prize and her MA research investigated the Council of Industrial Design and the Designs of the Year. Ness is an award-winning children’s book designer, who works with many wellknown authors and illustrators. She has been a judge at the prestigious Bologna Ragazzi Award and has taught publishing in Ethiopia through the British Council. Jonathan M. Woodham (University of Brighton) Professor Woodham is a leading figure in the development of the history of design as an academic discipline over the last four decades. He was Director of the Centre for Research and Development (Faculty of Arts) at the University of Brighton from 1998 to 2015.

xi

PREFACE Jonathan M. Woodham

In order to understand the distance that research, learning and teaching in design history has travelled over the past four decades and more – with all of its meandering byways, diversions and occasional off-road excursions – it is useful to review some elements of the mapping process. Such reflection also helps to clarify the ways in which a book such as Design Objects and the Museum is able to make a valuable contribution to theoretical, historical and curatorial discussions about the ways in which designed objects are addressed within the wider context of art and design history, object analysis and meaning, and museums and display. In the mid-1970s, when the history of design emerged as an academic discipline that was seeking to establish its own distinctive place within the British higher education provision in the arts and humanities, there were a number of different considerations that both conditioned and challenged its standing. In this context a major location for early design historical research, curriculum design and teaching and learning design was to be found in the newly formed British Polytechnics (today’s post-1992 universities) that, since the mid-1960s, were often formed through the amalgamation of local and regional colleges of art and design, technology and education. Indeed, a number of historians have seen this highly significant phase of educational change as one in which the history of design derived from a clear relationship with the changing requirements of art school education brought about as a consequence of the Coldstream1 and Summerson2 Reports. These had, in effect, brought about the compulsory introduction of historical and complementary studies that were seen to have an ‘academic’ content that raised the status of the existing broad-brush art and design curriculum from what was widely seen as worthy of a vocational award (the two-year National Diploma in Design – NDD ) to the more substantive academic equivalent (the three-year Diploma in Art and Design – Dip.AD )3 of degree awards prevalent in other disciplines taught in the pre-1992 universities. Degrees commanded higher salaries in the teaching professions, and an employment destination for many of those completing courses in art and design. However, the realities of these earlier years were more complex since the pedagogic intricacies of this period were greater than many written accounts have allowed:4 many of those involved with the contemporary curriculum development and teaching of, and research into, design history were graduates in art and architectural history in the ‘old’ university sector.5 A significant proportion had been trained in what came to be seen as conservative approaches to studies in visual and material culture with an emphasis on creative personalities, movements and styles,6 although within a comparatively short period of time the more challenging approach of what became known as the New Art History came into play.7 A number of others involved in shaping the design history agenda were drawn from a variety of other disciplinary origins. These included Gillian Naylor (1931–2014), who had read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford University before working on the Council of Industrial Design’s Design magazine in 1957, then under the editorship of Michael Farr,8 a former student of English taught by F. R. Leavis at the University of Cambridge. Naylor went on to a number of academic posts9 including Brighton College of Art and Design/Brighton Polytechnic between 1964 and 1971, Kingston Polytechnic, and the Royal College of Art where she was Professor. Farr had set up his own design management consultancy, Michael Farr (Design Integration) Limited, in central London in 196210 and published his pioneering book on Design Management (1966). From the early 1970s, while still managing his consultancy, he was teaching design

xii

Preface

history to all Multidisciplinary Design degree students at North Staffordshire Polytechnic before he was appointed to lead (1976–1987) the Swire School of Design in Hong Kong.11 John Heskett (1937–2014) was also another formative voice in the development of the history of design12 and brought yet another set of considerations to the table, having read economics, politics and history at the London School of Economics. This underpinned his interest in developing a wider design historical and design agenda embracing national identities, the State, and public organizations as well as the international growth and power of corporations. The museums sector was also represented in early discussions about the scope, nature and purpose of design history amongst what Penny Sparke described as ‘a group of academics based in several of Britain’s art schools (then part of the polytechnics . . .) who developed the discipline of design history and theory’.13 Complementing these was Carol Hogben, the Deputy Keeper of the Circulation Department14 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Through its Travelling Exhibitions service, ‘Circ’ was responsible for loans of non-specialist art and design collections to regional museums and schools with the aim of educating the general public in the value of design. Another contemporary phenomenon that provided a significant impetus in the early years of shaping the design history curriculum and research agenda was the work of key figures such as Tim and Charlotte Benton, Bridget Wilkins, Stephen Bayley, Stephan Muthesius, Peter Reyner Banham and Adrian Forty, all of whom had contributed to the pioneering Open University Course A305, The History of Architecture and Design 1890– 1939 (1975). Of particular note was that this course was supported not just by Documents: a collection of source material on the modern movement, but also by a Radiovision booklet to accompany a series of specially commissioned linked-in radio broadcasts, a similarly conceived set of television programmes that provided expert contemporary and historical critical commentary, as well as televisual ‘site visits’. Also part of this integrated audio-visual learning package were books of images and a wide variety of texts designed for distance learning. The latter were not only devoted to mainstream design movements of the period (such as the late Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, the Deutscher Werkbund, Modernism, Art Deco and Streamlining) but also included material on semi-detached suburban housing, the electric home and mechanical services. Forty years on from such a launch pad of exciting possibilities we are now firmly embedded in the digital age with emergent research extending the scope of the digital humanities. However, the development of the design history curriculum has not perhaps made the quantum leaps that might have been expected in the years since the A305 curriculum was researched, produced, presented and consumed, especially given the production of hundreds of doctorates worldwide and more specialist journals that help to underpin and promote the field, most notably the Journal of Design History (1988–). It was suggested in 2013 that ‘with the publication of three key texts within the past two years design history “seems to have reached a certain level of maturity” ’ (Huppatz and Lees-Maffei 2013); it was also considered that one of these, The Design History Reader (Lees-Maffei and Houze 2010) surveyed ‘the field, its methods and key themes’. The question might be raised as to how far it differed from earlier ‘readers’ and quotation and source books, particularly in relation to the range of authors and geographical locations selected for inclusion. To what extent was this work designed to accommodate a more pluralist approach to the teaching and learning of design history or histories, the significance of peripheries as well as centres, and reaching beyond the familiar and dominant Anglophone map that many researchers worldwide have sought to enhance? In the context of this book, a positive sign of the maturity of design history might be the range of contributors. They come from a variety of stages of their research careers, from doctorands to seasoned professionals, drawing on academics, curators, museum professionals and archivists as well as designers and makers. This is in marked contrast to the earlier design historical world of the 1970s15 when there was a distinct lack of doctoral theses, dedicated journals, interest from publishers beyond celebrated designers, styles, movements and periods, and relative uncertainty about the range of primary source materials that were xiii

Preface

most germane. Contributors to this book have been drawn from the UK , North America, Italy and Germany and the editors are engaged in collaborative research projects with the Research Department at the V&A and the Design Museum, London. Furthermore, the three themes of Design Objects and the Museum – The Canon and Design in the Museum, Positioning Design Within and Beyond the Museum, and Interpretation and the Challenge of Design – re-address, re-evaluate and considerably deepen our journeys into many of the territories that were first encountered as parts of the early, tentative steps of design history.

Notes 1. Sir William Coldstream became a major influence on British art education through chairmanship of the National Advisory Council for Art Education, which published two major documents that became known as the First and Second Coldstream Reports (1960 and 1970). 2. Sir John Summerson was appointed by the Ministry of Education in 1961 to chair the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design (NCDAD ) set up as an independent self-governing body to administer the award of diplomas (Dip.AD ) available to students in colleges of art and design. The Summerson Report on Diplomas in Art and Design was published in 1964. 3. On top of a one-year Pre-Diploma course, making a four-year total overall. 4. See, for example Hazel Clark’s ‘Design History and British design education. An appraisal’, in Elisava: Temes de Disseny. 5. For a fuller account of some of the background and opinions of a number of participants in the early phases of design history in Britain see ‘The Design History Society Oral History Project’. 6. Some aspects of this evolution of the history of design have been related in D. J. Huppatz and G. Lees-Maffei’s ‘Why Design History? A multinational perspective on the state and purpose of the field’, 2013, and J. M. Woodham’s ‘Recent Trends in Design History Research’, 2001. 7. See, for example, W. J. T. Mitchell’s foreword to a special issue of Critical Inquiry, 1989, devoted to the New Art History. See also J. Harris’s The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, 2001. 8. Author of Design in British Industry: A Mid-Century Survey, 1955. The foreword was written by Nikolaus Pevsner who also oversaw the text that complemented his own Enquiry into Industrial Art in England, 1937. 9. At the Royal College of Art where Naylor became Professor of Design History and inspired several generations of design historians at Masters and PhD level. 10. In 1968 this became Farr Ergonomics Limited, using the same premises and staff on London’s Tottenham Court Road. 11. The author, educated as a fine artist and art historian, was first acquainted with Farr’s year-long compulsory design history in 1974, co-taught with Catherine Netherwood, an inspiring young textile designer who undertook many textile commissions for Heal’s, London. He sat in on all their lectures and, following Farr’s (and Netherwood’s) departure to Hong Kong, took on the delivery of this course. 12. John Heskett was the author of the pioneering introductory text, Industrial Design, 1980, and several other defining texts that helped to shape an understanding of design in the everyday world. 13. See Penny Sparke’s ‘John Heskett Obituary’ in The Guardian. Sparke was herself a leading light in the development of design history in its early years, at Brighton Polytechnic, before moving to the Royal College of Art in 1981 and then Kingston University where she took on a senior management role whilst continuing to research at a high level. 14. For a more complete and well-researched account of the V&A’s Circulation Department see, for example, Joanna Weddell, ‘Room 38A and beyond: post-war British design and the Circulation Department’, in V&A Online Journal, 2012. 15. Some saw design history at degree-level (BA ) and degree equivalent (Dip.AD ) status in British higher education in the mid-1970s as a challenge to more established disciplines, particularly art history. At that time, when design

xiv

Preface historians were looking for representation on the Association of Art Historians’ executive committee as a means of strengthening their place in national higher education provision, the then Chair of the AAH was anxious to ensure that only an art historian should represent the design historical cause and pressured the proposed candidate to withdraw. Today, and for several decades since the 1970s, the AAH community has warmly embraced design history.

References Benton, T. (ed.) (1975) The History of Architecture and Design 1890–1939 (Course A305). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Clark, H. (1991) ‘Design History and British Design Education. An Appraisal’. Elisava: Temes de Disseny, 6. Barcelona: Escola Superior de Disseny. Available online: http://tdd.elisava.net/coleccion/6/clark-en/view?set_language=en (Accessed 22 June 2015). ‘The Design History Society Oral History Project’. Available online: http://www.vivavoices.org/website. asp?page=Interviews (Accessed 22 June 2015). Farr, M. (1955) Design in British Industry: A Mid-Century Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farr, M. (1966) Design Management. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Harris, J. (2001) The New Art History: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Heskett, J. (1980) Industrial Design. London: Thames and Hudson. Huppatz, D. J. and Lees-Maffei, G. (2013) ‘Why Design History? A Multinational Perspective on the State and Purpose of the Field’. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 12(2–3), 310–330. Lees-Maffei, G. and Houze, R. (eds) (2010) The Design History Reader. London: Berg. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1989) ‘Foreword’. Critical Inquiry, 15. Pevsner, N. (1937) Enquiry into Industrial Art in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sparke, P. (2014) ‘John Heskett Obituary’, The Guardian, 12 March 2014. Weddell, J. (2012) ‘Room 38A and Beyond: Post-war British Design and the Circulation Department’, V&A Online Journal, 4. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-4-summer-2012/ room-38a-and-beyond-post-war-british-design-and-the-circulation-department (Accessed 8 October 2014). Woodham, J. M. (2001) ‘Recent Trends in Design History Research’. In Calvera Sagué, A. and Mallol, M. (eds), Historíar des de la Perifèria, Historia I Historias del Disseny. Barcelona: University of Barcelona.

xv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Association of Art Historians’ 2013 Annual Conference at the University of Reading had a conference session convened by the editors on the subject of Design Objects and the Museum. We would like to thank the Conference Organizers at the University of Reading, Dr Paul Davies and Dr Sue Malden, the Conference Administrator, Cheryl Platt, and the Conference Contact at the AAH , Claire Davies. We are grateful to the contributors who spoke at our conference session: Sue Breakell, Helen Charman, Jason Cleverly, Virginia Lucarelli, Gillian Russell, Deborah Sugg Ryan, Damon Taylor and Gareth Williams. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Dorothy Barenscott, of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver, who delivered an invaluable paper, Object Lesson: Vancouver’s Tobias Wong. We are grateful to our contributors: Leah Armstrong, Nicola Ashmore, Guy Julier, Marianne Lamonaca, Megha Rajguru, Jana Scholze, Nicola Stylianou, Tom Wilson and Ness Wood; Jonathan Woodham has kindly provided the Preface. Last but not least, our gratitude goes to our commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, Rebecca Barden, and her editorial assistant, Abbie Sharman, for their help and support.

xvi

INTRODUCTION Joanna Weddell and Liz Farrelly

This book was prompted by the comment from a respondent to Bourdieu and Darbel’s survey: ‘Maybe there should be museums with modern stuff in them, but it wouldn’t be a proper museum’ (Bourdieu and Darbel 1969:48). Despite its title, The Love of Art features an exhibition of contemporary design held in Lille, ‘The Art of the Interior in Denmark’, which showed ‘everyday objects such as glass and crystal, ceramics and furniture’, introducing the ‘atmosphere of the department store’. Bourdieu and Darbel compare the art gallery with this ‘poor man’s museum’ stressing the contrast between the sacred and the profane: ‘untouchable – touchable; noise – contemplative silence; swift and haphazard exploration – slow and orderly procession; involved appreciation of venal works – pure appreciation of “priceless” works’, all of which notionally posit the museum of contemporary design as one offering a distinct experience (Bourdieu and Darbel 1969:50, 89). This book addresses the place of contemporary design objects within museums and the wider discipline of art history, with a focus on the interpretation of design. The chapters cover the collection, study and exhibition of contemporary design, from the unique, fetishized decorative object to the mass-produced industrial commodity. Chapters give perspectives on historical developments in the post-war period and aim to expand live debates on the future place of design objects in the museum. The book raises issues around design in relation to the canon, museums and interpretation in the late twentieth and twenty-first century. Current government agendas on culture and education may stress global competition but should high-quality design objects be preserved as reified cultural products or, alternatively, should the latest gadgets be studied as examples of industrial process? Does design, in the museum context, represent a rare negotiation between art and industry, state and citizen, the official and the popular, eliding categorization as a straightforwardly commodified or aestheticized object? Or does it simply canonize an edifying notion of ‘good taste’? Does contemporary design, which is often ephemeral or ‘process-based’, stretch and strain the collecting and display procedures of the museum? And, in a world of multiple choices, is there still a need for the museum to promote ‘good design’ to the public? The debate is structured into sections on the relationship between the traditional canon of art history and design, on the position of design within and beyond museums, and on the challenges and opportunities that contemporary design presents to curatorial interpretation.

Part I: The Canon and Design in the Museum The first section relates to the notion of the ‘canon’ of art history and, by implication, museological practice and issues that arise when placing design within museums, progressing through post-war concepts of ‘good design’ to the contemporary. The London-based chapters in Part I show a trajectory leading design from wartime restrictions through the expansion of trade and consumption, and the institutionalization of design promotion, to the emergence of new models of analysis in relation to gender and class, and on to the present. The chapter order is broadly chronological and begins with Breakell’s examination of how the archetype of the mid-century art historian, Kenneth Clark, engaged with ‘good’ post-war design, drawing on her extensive knowledge of the Kenneth Clark Archive at Tate. As Breakell explains, a series of exhibitions of domestic

xvii

Introduction

design organized by CEMA built on the propagandist aims of Utility design and culminated in the littleknown Design at Home exhibition, 1945, held in the surprising venue of London’s National Gallery. The philanthropic paternalism characteristic of the Attlee government is a thread followed by Weddell who discusses the ways in which the radical ethos of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) Circulation Department (Circ) under Keeper Peter Floud was demonstrated by its activities between 1947 and 1960. Circ exhibitions of contemporary design may have deliberately flouted the V&A’s then canon, but they remained true to the Museum’s founding purpose. The chapter elaborates Floud’s complex position regarding the handmade, the mythologizing of craft and the evolving discipline of industrial design, particularly in relation to US influences. There were no such concerns or complications for the Council of Industrial Design (CoID . Wood uses the significant displays of the 1957 Designs of the Year (DOTY ) at CoID’s new Haymarket Design Centre to examine design in relation to class, taste and consumption. The DOTY selections were not consistently brave, modern or progressive as Wood’s detailed examination of correspondence (between the institution and its judges) demonstrates, revealing the limits of British establishment taste. Stylianou returns us to the V&A where the donation of Hayes Textiles was accommodated by the Museum canon because it met the criteria of representing British design. The Museum’s founding collections define its remit even though these arrived from disparate sources and were formed by various motives. In examining the relationship of the Nigerian gele to the V&A collections, Stylianou highlights the complexity of transnational processes, as the UK textile company designed for its colonial market. Of more recent foundation and with an avowedly more commercial and industrial remit is the Design Museum, London, which emerged from an earlier prototype, the Boilerhouse Project at the V&A. Sugg Ryan engages with design exhibitions that break the curatorial mould, discussing her role as curator of the Design Museum’s Ideal Home exhibition, 1993. The limitations of even a contemporary canon are demonstrated through reactions to this museum’s representation of a truly popular and commercial trade exhibition and by examining the media coverage of Constance Spry: A millionaire for a few pence, 2004, also at the Design Museum, London. In contrast to younger design museums, commentators might see the V&A as the ‘lumbering old mother museum’ (Pearman 2014) but Scholze explains the Museum’s efforts to evolve and adapt in an age not dissimilar to Prince Albert’s ‘period of most wonderful transition’ with its ‘achievements of modern invention’ (Martin 1877). Scholze discusses the challenge to curatorial practice represented by digital objects that resist traditional insistence on singularity and provenance but that can nevertheless be documented. With her account of the 2013 acquisition of the 3D-printed firearm, Liberator, Scholze brings the canon up to date.

Part II: Positioning Design within and beyond the Museum Part II discusses the positioning of contemporary design within and beyond the art gallery, the national museum, the commercial space, the design museum and onto broader national and international stages, in the process extending debates about design versus art by examining newly minted terminology, such as Design Art and World Art. The section expands from the new museology approach of New Labour to cover dynamic, narrative and outward-facing curatorial roles in the UK and Italy – closing with the re-visioning of design in a Scandinavian museum. Rajguru and Ashmore recount contemporary curatorial activity around an historic collection in Brighton where designed objects are positioned as world art, perhaps as curio/us others. Their chapter pays close attention to the specifics of labels and curatorial strategies to evaluate the Hindu Shrine Project performances xviii

Introduction

and outreach exercises undertaken in Brighton in relation to displays at the Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum, Pune, India. Lucarelli outlines the curatorial strategies that, each year, reposition the displays at the Triennale Design Museum (TDM ), Milan, using a dynamic model that rejects the static monolithic permanent collection of the design museum. The TDM approach questions museological authority – itself always subject to successive revisions – creating a structure of multiple loans from beyond the museum. This openly transient multiplicity of readings can be seen as a refutation of Marinetti’s museum/cemetery paradigm (Marinetti 1909). Narrative readings are the subject of Taylor’s chapter, which examines two temporary exhibitions of contemporary furniture that inhabit the category of Design Art, one show positioned in a commercial gallery and the other in the UK ’s ‘national museum of art and design’. Through these shows Taylor makes a subtle analysis of definitions of design and its relation to art. The category of Design Art might be contemporary but perhaps bears similarities to those virtuoso displays of modish technique that formed part of the spectacle of the nineteenth-century world’s fairs. Williams (incidentally the curator of Telling Tales, the subject of Taylor’s chapter) discusses what he sees as modern versions of the world’s fairs (including the expo) and the role of contemporary design as soft diplomacy beyond the museum. In addition to this form of state design patronage, he recognizes a further, semi-national strategy, in the liminal spaces between borders and cultures such as the airport terminal, only now with the co-option of the museum. Williams’ wide-ranging examples, from 1851 to 2012, from Shanghai to Heathrow, build to an optimistic conclusion about Britain’s role as an intersection for cultural design. Pursuing a Scandinavian angle, Russell examines the recent exhibition Risk Centre at the Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, which re-appraised and re-positioned what design in the museum can achieve. Here critical design is seen to subvert passive space within the museum and re-assert the role of design as process seen through the lens of Rogoff ’s embodied criticality.

Part III: Interpretation and the Challenge of Design The final Part examines the challenge presented by contemporary design to interpretation and learning in the museum, and the role of curators, exhibition designers and visitors in shaping experience and creating meaning. Contemporary design in the museum is examined as political, as postcolonial and as engaging the visitor, and by implication extending the activity and reach of the design museum. This section begins with a personal and retrospective glance at the curatorial challenges presented by design in The Wolfsonian, Miami Beach, by objects produced under various political regimes both fascist and socialist, beyond the well-tempered middle market humanism that characterizes much twentieth-century ‘good design’. Lamonaca’s selection and presentation of works in the distinct context of the museum are shown to reveal the political through a didactic interpretive methodology. Wilson’s poetic and evocative images communicate the success of another form of ‘retrospective’, the You Are Here: NID Traces show, 2013, which re-interpreted the National Institute of Design collection at Ahmedabad from a global perspective. The US -led initiative of The India Report, 1958, authored by Charles and Ray Eames, was adopted, adapted and appropriated, with contemporary interpretation encouraging further participation from design students, teaching staff and the public. This participative approach is also highlighted by Charman who posits a distinct difference between curating and interpreting design as opposed to contemporary art. Charman’s text moves from theory to the voices of design museum curators and visitors in an innovative approach based on visitor studies conducted at the Design Museum, London. xix

Introduction

Visitor engagement is again a priority for design-maker-curator Cleverly who foregrounds the noise and animation of his interventions. Cleverly analyses a variety of interpretive approaches that expand the boundaries between art and science, enhanced by his experience instigating interactive museum displays. The goal is not simply to interpret but also to produce a new site-specific object. Armstrong and Julier examine the recent Design Culture Salons at the V&A, representing a new era in social engagement for the design industry and the museum. Design Culture Salons seem to be a diversion from the production, preservation or curation of contemporary objects, however the format has much in common with that nineteenth-century manifestation of a ‘salon for all’, the Mechanics Institute. These provided a locus where designers and makers forged and tempered their thoughts and ideas in evening discussions away from the factory floor or draughting office; the DCS presents us with a more contemporary version, tweeted, blogged, streamed, vlogged and tubed. Farrelly examines the evolution of interactivity beyond the gallery and onto the Internet, looking at how digital technology has shaped the online offer of the museum, through digitized archives and collections, more transparent management and new opportunities for public engagement. As the museum becomes a networked community, Farrelly examines implications for the object.

In conclusion The museology of the art museum has been extensively discussed, published and taught while that of the design museum has received less attention. This imbalance reflects the status and position of the (at least notionally) functional objects housed by museums of design compared with fine art. Tensions around definitions of design are revealed by the range of categories available; design may be applied arts, decorative arts, material culture or those anxiety-promoting versions – industrial and commercial. Design may be hand-, batch- or mass-produced, a one-off or a branded object created by a global network of design, production, distribution and marketing. Divisions between science and art, between technology and the visual, between factory and studio, are made evident in the more ambiguous position of design and designers in contemporary commerce and culture compared with the megastars of the art world and the academic deification of scientists. And for museums tasked with the collection and display of design, this imbalance is further complicated by troublesome ambiguities; in a world where objects are fast losing their materiality the definition of design becomes more and more unstable. What is the project to which this book contributes? Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup and saucer is art while the Roberts R500 leopard-skin radio is design, Jeff Koons’ double-decker vacuum cleaners provoke thought while Dyson’s cyclone cleaners generate profit and political debates about the globalization of production and consumption. The identity of the design museum is related to its past, to its genesis in various trade initiatives by nineteenth-century government; unsurprising then that some of the most recent versions have obvious commercial ties. Fine art and decorative art are cultural constructs that may prove irrelevant as the museum begins to accommodate the products of the digital age, but the future mission of the design museum remains tied to its industrial past. The place and literature of the design object compared with the work of art may be distinct but is of no less interest, and as Tobias Wong’s brief career proved, boundaries between the two can and should be crossed; such transgressions are not easily contained nor defined. By presenting a wide range of voices, approaches and subject matter, we hope this book will push beyond the disciplinary boundaries that might too closely define areas of interest, and instead develop wider debates around the intersection of the designed object and the museum.

xx

Introduction

References Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1969, translation 1991) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marinetti, F. T. (1909) ‘Manifeste de futurisme’, Le Figaro, 20 February 1909. Martin, T. (1877) The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, Volume 2. New York: D. Appleton and Co. (pp. 201– 208). Prince Albert’s speech, Mansion House, 21 March 1849. Pearman, H. (2014) ‘How to use gorilla tactics’, The Sunday Times, 3 August 2014, 18–19.

xxi

xxii

PART I THE CANON AND DESIGN IN THE MUSEUM

1

2

CHAPTER 1 EXHIBITING ‘THE TASTE OF EVERYDAY THINGS’: KENNETH CLARK AND CEMA’S WARTIME EXHIBITIONS OF DESIGN Sue Breakell

For a brief period in the second half of the Second World War, the Arts Panel of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA ), led by Sir Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), experimented with extending its remit into exhibiting design. This little-studied series of exhibitions, between 1942 and 1945, involved the Council in an emerging debate about the responsibility for state-endorsed display of design objects, and contributed to the blurring of traditional boundaries between the museum, commercial exhibitions and the particular aesthetic of the wartime propaganda display. Clark, whose engagement with design was at a peak during this period, was involved in all of these fields: he was Chair of CEMA’s Arts Panel; he was Director of a national museum, albeit one with no remit for design (National Gallery, London, 1933– 1945); and he was involved in discussions that led to the establishment of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID ) in 1944, with a remit that included the exhibition of design.1 The pursuit of shared wartime aims through exhibitions brought together museological, commercial and propaganda perspectives, in varying proportions and in unprecedented ways. Display was an effective means of articulating values in wartime, and Clark’s Art Panel showed a tendency to seek to reconcile past and present so as to establish continuity in what was being fought for. For CEMA , with its bent towards the art world, the transformative involvement of Misha Black and Milner Gray was particularly significant, as members of both the Design Research Unit (DRU ) and the Ministry of Information (MOI ) exhibitions department, the influence of which has been widely discussed (Davies 2008; Cotton 2010). In his book Exhibition Design Black quotes an unnamed commentator as saying ‘in no other field of art and architecture have the war years brought so generous and so healthy a harvest as in exhibition design’ (Black 1950: 11). CEMA was established in December 1939, with Clark one of the initial committee appointed by the Board of Education, to ‘maintain the highest possible standard in our national arts of music, drama and painting at a time when these things are threatened and when too they mean more to the life of the country than they have ever meant before’ (V&A EL 1/2).2 CEMA’s work was structured around three panels: Art, with Clark its Chair; Music; and Drama. A major component of the Art Panel’s work was touring exhibitions, initially through the British Institute for Adult Education’s (BIAE ) Art for the People scheme. Clark said in October 1940 that the circulating exhibition scheme ‘gave real hope for the future because it was laying the foundations of a popular understanding of living art and living artists . . . it was the one channel open for getting in touch with ordinary people and creating among them a new and genuine appreciation of painting’ (V&A EL 1/3, 6th meeting). His colleague Bill Williams described it as ‘pioneering work in unsophisticated communities’ (V&A EL 1/6, Council Paper 119), suggesting the values of benevolent paternalism that underpinned this programme for the dissemination of culture. From 1942 CEMA organized its own exhibitions as well; these were intended to be ‘more sophisticated’ (V&A EL 1/15, Council Paper 137) than the BIAE ’s smaller scheme, suggesting that certain communities were expected to be more receptive. CEMA also began an art collection, commissioning 3

Design Objects and the Museum

and purchasing artworks with a complementary purpose: ‘to give illustrations of pleasing and competent contemporary work, which might be bought by ordinary people and lived with in ordinary homes’ (V&A EL 1/20). As CEMA’s programme of art exhibitions expanded in scope and geographical coverage, it was but a short step for such a mission to incorporate design. It began to include design exhibitions with a broadly similar aim of developing the public’s confidence in buying, or what in a fine art context Clark called patronage: both design and patronage were growing interests of Clark’s at this time.3 At the opening of an early exhibition of the CEMA art collection in 1942, he declared that the show was ‘not so much an attempt at state patronage, as an encouragement to private patronage . . . its very modesty is a proof that painting is not solely a thing for public galleries, any more than flowers are things for public gardens’ (TGA 8812/2/2/991). Before the war, design had been a peripheral engagement for him: for example, his membership of the Post Office’s Poster Advisory Group, or opening an exhibition of commercial art at Shell, reflected his status as an establishment expert and someone with ‘taste’. As the war progressed, Clark became increasingly involved in design, as a practical means of employing fine art – and artists – in the projects of wartime propaganda and post-war reconstruction. Alongside his work with the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and a string of other artsrelated committees, design was another way to encourage aesthetic appreciation and thus a kind of artistic patronage by both industry and public: ‘During the last twenty years, artists have come to look hopefully towards industry as a patron’ (Clark 1944). Clark was also an active member of the Weir Committee, appointed by the Board of Trade, generally considered as the immediate bureaucratic trigger for the formation of the Council of Industrial Design in December 1944, whose mission was ‘to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry’ (CoID 5). Clark turned down the salaried post of Director of the CoID (TNA BT 64/1573)4 but was a founding member and chaired the Design and Exhibitions committee, although he resigned from this role as early as May 1945, which might be considered the start of his disengagement from design.5 From the start, reaching both public and industry through displays and exhibitions was a priority for the CoID.6 Such an idea was not new: it had been regularly proposed through the 1920s and 1930s by bodies including the Design and Industries Association and the Council of Art and Industry, as well as in the Gorell report of 1932, all part of the momentum that culminated in the CoID’s formation. A letter from Hugh Dalton, President of the Board of Trade, to Thomas Barlow, Chairman of the CoID, in December 1944, reproduced in the Council’s first Annual Report, declares the first two functions of the Council to be ‘to encourage and assist the establishment and conduct of Design Centres by industries’ and ‘to provide a national display of well designed goods by holding, or participating in, exhibitions and to conduct publicity for good design in other appropriate forms’ (CoID ). Through 1945 the National Exhibition of Industrial Design began to take shape; eventually titled Britain Can Make It (BCMI ), it was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) from September to December 1946.7 Meanwhile, under Clark’s Art Panel, two strands of CEMA design exhibitions had emerged in 1943. The BIAE , with its remit of reaching ‘unsophisticated communities’, organized Design in Daily Life for CEMA : ‘pottery, glass, textiles and household equipment arranged to demonstrate the importance of form and colour in modern design’ (TNA ED 136/188A), suggesting that it comprised new or at least broadly contemporary objects.8 In Clark’s archive is a leaflet for Ideas on Design in the Home, a CEMA /BIAE Art for the People exhibition from around 1943–1944; this may be the same exhibition, but if not, it is similar in scope and intent, listing six rules to guide consumer choices: ‘the creation of a delightful home is a task which calls for careful estimate of our budget and full use of our powers of discrimination . . . what we should above all strive for is to create an atmosphere of peace and comfort, and to achieve that end we must choose our decorations, textiles and furniture with care’ (‘Ideas on Design in the Home’, TGA 8812/1/1/44). 4

Kenneth Clark and Design

Figure 1.1 Design in the Home, exhibition leaflet, CEMA /V&A, 1943. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archive. 5

Design Objects and the Museum

The objects are all contemporary, and listed with their lenders: manufacturers including Wedgwood, Powell and Edinburgh Weavers, as well as designers such as Allan Walton and Helen Pincombe, and, in one case, the British Colour Council. In 1943, the V&A prepared for CEMA a show of quite different conception, called Design in the Home. Juxtaposing pieces from the Museum’s collections with contemporary objects, which did not fall within the Museum’s collecting or exhibiting remit at that time, it declared the aim of showing continuity between traditional English design and a more modern sensibility: ‘a . . . few older objects . . . side by side with contemporary work, to illustrate something of the character of the English tradition, with its stress on the beauty of simple forms and restrained and sober colour, and its practical regard for the requirements of use’ (exhibition leaflet, DCA ). Not only was such an aesthetically oriented purpose much more in line with the exhibition practices of a museum, it also matched Clark’s own position within the broad spectrum of attitudes to modernism, in relation to contemporary art and design: for him, it was important that contemporary pieces maintained continuity with the vernacular British tradition, rather than simply appropriating the characteristics of international modernism.9 Indeed, this question would prove fundamental to his disillusionment with the possibilities of initiatives such as the CoID, in the post-war period (Breakell 2015). In 1953 he wrote: ‘aesthetic faculties . . . reflect the whole character of a civilisation . . . which is outside the scope of the Council of Industrial Design or any similar body. . . . In practice, efforts to improve the taste of everyday things consist in the cutting down of ornament, thus depriving the object of that marginal exuberance which gives the craftsmanship of the past its charm for us’ (TGA 8812/2/2/47). A CEMA leaflet entitled ‘Art for the People’ refers to the V&A exhibition of 1943 as ‘arranged to show the continuity of good design in a few objects of everyday use in English homes’ (TNA ED 136/188A). The exhibition leaflet itself combines aesthetic and commercial approaches, referring to ‘simple beauty of form’ as well as to the moderate price and manufacturing costs of the contemporary objects displayed, reflecting the ideas that underpinned the notions of Good Design associated with the Utility Scheme (see, for example Attfield 1999). Although the BIAE exhibitions toured to regional museums, there is nevertheless a clear distinction here between those exhibitions organized by museums and those that were not; CEMA exhibitions were ‘more sophisticated’ than the BIAE ’s not only in their inclusion of museum objects, but in their curatorial and organizing methods, bringing the V&A’s authority to what might otherwise be seen as a propagandist exercise. These design exhibitions, and the questions they raised about CEMA’s contribution to this field, culminated in a larger exhibition, Design At Home, 1945, whose shape evolved in discussion with the Board of Trade and a panel of industrialists, and thus with direct reference to discussions about the emerging Council of Industrial Design and its exhibiting ambitions. In January 1944, at the request of Philip James, then Director of the Art Panel, Misha Black of the Design Research Unit (DRU ) prepared a Paper for submission to the CEMA Council, Notes on an exhibition of industrial design. A covering letter from James explained that: ‘the need for an exhibition to encourage the appreciation of industrial design has been expressed in several quarters . . . a meeting of industrialists and representatives from departments has been convened to discover whether the idea seems practicable’ (V&A EL 1/17, Council Paper 178). Black’s document provides the rationale for CEMA’s involvement in such an exhibition, and the expansion of its existing design ambitions: In its fine art exhibitions, CEMA has unquestionably set the standard for all other exhibiting bodies. . . . In the fine arts, music and drama the Council has brilliantly interpreted encouragement of the arts to mean national leadership. 6

Kenneth Clark and Design

Figure 1.2 Exhibition catalogue for Design at Home: an exhibition of furniture and furnishings, Arts Council of Great Britain/CEMA , National Gallery, 1945. Front cover. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archive.

This, however, is not the case as far as industrial design is concerned. The CEMA industrial design exhibitions have been small in size, few in number and unimpressive in technique. . . . While a new small CEMA exhibition on industrial design would be of some minor value, the time seems to have been reached when CEMA could reasonably assume, in industrial design, that position of national leadership which it enjoys in relation to other visual arts. The design of post-war industrial projects will be a major factor in determining our environment and in the re-establishment of Britain’s export trade. While the latter problem may not be the direct concern of CEMA , the former seems clearly to come within its province (V&A EL 1/17, Council Paper 178). By claiming ‘determining our environment’ as the concern of CEMA , Black chimes with Clark’s approach to design. He refers explicitly to the proposals of the Weir Committee, of which Clark was a member, and to the display remit of what became the CoID : ‘it would be a preliminary experimental prototype of the permanent British Design Pavilion which I understand is recommended by the Weir Committee’. In asserting for CEMA a position of ‘national leadership’, Black makes an extraordinarily bold attempt on the territory already intended for the Council of Industrial Design. The number of people in this country able to effectively organise and design an industrial design exhibition is limited; the problems of materials and exhibition premises are acute . . . instead of organising

7

Design Objects and the Museum

a new small CEMA exhibition the Council should . . . sponsor the production of one major exhibition, sufficiently impressive in size, scope and method of presentation to set a standard for all future shows of this character. CEMA is the only body with sufficient integrity, prestige and authority to undertake this task. If CEMA is unwilling to do so, we must expect a whole series of exhibitions on industrial design each boosting one particular industry or other, and none with sufficient authority to be accepted by the public and manufacturers as providing that leadership so urgently needed if British industrial design is to be rescued from that pathetic sordidity which is now its characteristic feature (V&A EL 1/17, Council Paper 178). The main Council was supportive of the principle of a larger scale design exhibition: ‘An exhibition of Design on a far more important scale than either of the Design Exhibitions so far circulated seemed appropriate at the present moment’ (TNA ED 136/188A, 5th meeting, 18 Jan 1944). The Board of Trade, to whom the proposal was passed before the meeting of the Arts Panel at which this was discussed, were ‘uncompromisingly opposed to holding an exhibition which could not contain objects which were for purchase by the public’ (TNA ED 136/188A, 5th meeting, 18 Jan 1944); Clark himself later expressed a similar widely held concern about BCMI , writing to the CoID’s Director, S. C. Leslie, in August 1945: ‘All I feel is that the exhibition should not be too large because there will simply not be the stuff to show, and it is better to tell the President so now than to find ourselves letting in second rate things of which we shall all be secretly ashamed when the time comes’ (DCA /14A/312); rationing of domestic items such as furniture continued until 1952. The Board of Trade, and Clark, would also have been conscious that such an exhibition might conflict with, or steal the thunder of, the future CoID. Black’s proposal was rejected: his ‘suggestion for an exhibition on the really grand scale was impracticable, at any rate at present’ (TNA ED 136/188A, 6th meeting, 29 Feb 1944). Nevertheless, CEMA still wanted to be involved in a design exhibition: ‘CEMA offers its service to secure an impartial selection of material, and to ensure that it shall be an exhibition of taste as well as trade.’ It may be that this was Clark’s intention all along: for CEMA to contribute a similar element of ‘taste’ to the emergent state-endorsed design exhibitions, to that which he might be seen to bring to the Council of Industrial Design through his involvement: as demonstrated by the fact that even after his resignation from the chair of the Design and Exhibitions Committee, Clark accepted an invitation to review the furnished rooms component of Britain Can Make It (TGA 8812/1/4/126), even though he had resigned from chairing the Design and Exhibitions Committee in late May 1945, a few weeks after Design at Home opened. A second report was commissioned, this time from Black’s DRU colleague Milner Gray, and discussed by the Panel in July 1944 (TNA ED 136/188A). Even this more modest version required a budget of £3,000, much larger than any other CEMA exhibition to date, but nevertheless approved. Rather than Black’s ambitious scheme to bring together industry, the professions and the public, Gray set out a similar purpose to the V&A’s Design in the Home exhibition of the previous year, and indeed to BCMI : The principle [sic] aim of this exhibition is understood to be to explain to the general public the nature and function of what has come to be called Industrial Design and to foster public interest in and appreciation of good design in things of everyday use . . . the object here would be to emphasise that good design need cost no more than bad (Gray TNA ED 136/188A). The catalogue for Design at Home, which opened on 1 May 1945 at the National Gallery, shows that it was significantly scaled down from Gray’s original proposals. It declares a more modest intention than either Black or Gray envisaged: one more in keeping with CEMA’s remit: 8

Kenneth Clark and Design

With the close of the European war, it is felt that an exhibition relating to the problem of home furnishing and decoration in the immediate post-war period would not be inappropriate . . . Anything that will encourage a display of individual taste and an interest in the pleasant task of home making, beset by difficulties though it may be, is to be desired. We have received the most friendly advice throughout from the Board of Trade, and it is most satisfactory to be able to record that the new Council of Industrial Design came into being during the period of the exhibition’s production, a welcome token of the government’s determination to encourage the use of good design in industry (DCA , Design at Home, 1). Thus the CEMA catalogue cedes authority to the CoID while asserting its own territory, taste: it then withdraws from the field. Gray’s proposal indicates an attempt to reconcile what had previously been more distinct modes of display: commercial, entertainment and educative modes brought together to serve propaganda purposes. Talking of entrance fees, he attempts to locate the exhibition on such a spectrum. In this war it has been accepted that exhibitions which are purely instructional, or propagandist and in the national interest cannot justify an admission charge; but an exhibition on Industrial Design of the type envisaged, whilst educational in aim, has a definite entertainment value and therefore could be very justifiably exempt from the above strictures (Gray TNA ED 136/188A). Playing these tensions out in practical as well as conceptual terms, Gray touches on the balance between object, staging and interpretation: collected opinion tends to show that public interest in the purely photo-documentary show is beginning to pall. The display should comprise a large proportion of manufactured articles . . . but it is equally important that these articles should be shown not as a mere museum collection but as part of a larger story running through the exhibition. Clearly, to Gray, a conventional museum display alone will not convey a strong enough message: a letter from panel member Philip Hendy to Gray in August 1944 represents one possible museum perspective, and supports Gray’s view: ‘all texts are detestable in exhibitions: likewise all photos, diagrams, captions etc. etc. It seems to me the catalogue is the proper place for all such propaganda and explanations, as well as for the names of designers and manufacturers (V&A EL 2/1).10 There is a good deal of this kind of information in the catalogue. Noel Carrington’s introduction declared: ‘The whole object of this exhibition is to prove . . . the ability to triumph over the deadening effects of standardization by the exercise of personal judgment and taste’ (DCA , Design at Home, 2). Design at Home took a more overtly educational line than the previous exhibitions, aiming to evoke a concrete response from the visitor. The catalogue speaks of a ‘design problem for each room’, teaching the viewer how to solve domestic design problems by the exercise of personal choice, or taste. The National Gallery was not the obvious venue for a design exhibition, but in the absence of its collection (stored in Welsh mines to avoid bombing), the Gallery under Clark’s direction had been used for purposes unimaginable before the war, thus attracting new audiences. Through exhibitions, concerts and picnics on the lawn outside, the wartime Gallery became a space where notions of British culture and character could be articulated. As such, it had particular associations as a venue for this exhibition. Seeking approval for the exhibition, Clark reassured the National Gallery trustees that it would be held in ‘rooms unsuitable for the exhibition of paintings’: the primacy of paintings was not in question (NG 1/12, 3 October 1944). 9

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 1.3 ‘Bachelor bed-sitting room’, from the exhibition catalogue for Design at Home: an exhibition of furniture and furnishings, Arts Council of Great Britain/CEMA , National Gallery, 1945. Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archive.

This blurring of the traditional boundaries of the museum also erupted in other ways. The V&A’s new Director, Leigh Ashton, was concerned about the involvement of both CEMA and the CoID in the display of contemporary objects, which was a function of the Museum’s long-established Department of Circulation. As early as November 1944 the V&A threatened to cut off its exhibition preparation services to CEMA (TNA ED 136/188B); in Spring 1945, perhaps provoked by the opening of Design at Home, Ashton made what Arts Council Chairman Maynard Keynes described in a letter to Mary Glasgow as ‘amount[ing] to a proposal that the V&A should take over the whole business of selecting and distributing exhibitions, instead of CEMA’ (V&A EL 2/1, 15 June 1945). Later, Ashton wrote to CEMA Secretary Glasgow that the touring of exhibitions of objects was ‘not a proper duty of the Council except on special occasions’ (V&A EL 2/1, 15, 25 July 1945). Clearly on the defensive, Ashton proposed that the V&A, the CoID and CEMA should share a central depot for the storage, packing and transportation of objects, as part of the Museum’s plans for re-opening its Circulation service after the war, thus giving the Museum the pivotal role as holder of this expertise.11 A CoID document from around this same time entitled ‘A Policy and Programme for Exhibition’ notes, under the subheading ‘the need for co-ordination’, stated: The V&A . . . has many facilities for the assembling, purchase, circulation and display of objects. A valuable working partnership can be organized between the Council and the V&A which has offered unstinted help. The Council might well adapt a general rule of using the V&A resources and facilities to the fullest extent wherever possible (DCA /14/14[E1]). Indeed, as Doreen Leach has noted, Ashton also criticized the CoID’s plans in terms of both collecting and display of objects (Maguire and Woodham 1997: 224). Initially he lamented the fact that the Museum was not

10

Kenneth Clark and Design

represented on the Council, while Clark, Director of another national museum whose remit had nothing to do with design, was a member, albeit in a personal capacity. In May 1945, as Design at Home opened, and at around the same time as his exchanges with CEMA , Ashton was dismayed to discover that the CoID planned to purchase objects, apparently in direct competition with the Museum’s Circulation Department. Ashton saw Clark as being responsible for the CoID’s plan, presumably because Clark had initiated CEMA’s picturebuying activities. Ashton believed he saw ‘a dictatorship on modern design controlled by Sir Kenneth Clark and two Government Departments competing with each other’ (Maguire and Woodham 1997: 225). In fact by late summer there might have appeared to be the threat of three competing state-funded bodies, the V&A, CEMA and the CoID, two of which were heavily influenced by Clark, who had also brought another national museum, the National Gallery, into the fray. However, with the opening of Design at Home, not only CEMA but also Clark, with his resignation from the CoID’s Design and Exhibitions Committee, began to withdraw from the field. At the first meeting of that Committee, in February 1945, Clark had explained that the largescale CEMA design exhibition ‘had been planned before the Council had come into being; but on behalf of CEMA he agreed with the suggestion that mention might be made of the Council’ (DCA /42/289); we have seen that the catalogue did just that. But crucially, the CoID document that recorded the V&A’s offers of help also noted that ‘CEMA (The Arts Council) has organized large and small exhibitions of design, but an informal understanding has now been reached with them by which they will leave industrial art and design entirely to the Council’ (DCA /14/14[E1]). A struggle for territory had been played out over the location of design exhibitions, with skirmishes between a variety of interested parties. Who in these circumstances was qualified to pass judgement on the contemporary design object? What was its status and function in these different kinds of display and venue? Could designer, manufacturer, curator and bureaucrat resolve these issues between them? Clearly committed to the importance of an exhibition of design, which fitted with his ideas about the visual arts in wartime and post-war society, Clark was happy simultaneously to be involved in multiple and potentially competing elements, employing his skills of cultural brokerage to navigate a course, at times both proactive and reactive, though not without provoking responses such as Ashton’s. CEMA’s exhibitions, organized largely for what Black would call propaganda purposes, with an overarching wartime purpose of consumer education, nevertheless also came under CEMA’s brief of arts appreciation. In planning a larger scale exhibition ‘of taste as well as trade’, CEMA collided with the CoID’s emerging agenda. Meanwhile, although the location of displays of design in museums gave aesthetic credibility, museums would generally consider themselves above commercial considerations, and, at this time, beyond presiding over contemporary design. The siting of BCMI at the V&A in 1946, over other possible locations such as Earls Court (Maguire and Woodham 1997: 50), is part of this same debate about exhibiting design in the museum. The location of this small series of CEMA exhibitions within a broader aesthetic agenda begins to establish a more comprehensive set of questions than have generally been considered in relation to BCMI , when discussed as primarily a commercial or industry project. This episode contributes a richer context to those emerging post-war debates about exhibiting design in the museum.

Notes 1. The archive of the Council of Industrial Design (later the Design Council) is held at the University of Brighton Design Archives. 2. For a history of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, see White (1975), Hutchinson (1982) and Witts (1998).

11

Design Objects and the Museum 3. Clark spoke and wrote frequently about patronage at this time: for example a discussion with Eric Newton on the BBC Radio programme ‘The Artist and The Patron’, in the series ‘The Artist in the Witness Box’. 4. Thomas Barlow personally spoke to Clark to offer him the position. 5. The period of Clark’s closer involvement and disillusionment with design is considered in more detail in Breakell (2015). 6. See, for example, Whitworth (2004). 7. Records relating to BCMI can be found in the Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. Published analyses include: Maguire, P. J. and Woodham, J. M. Design and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain: the Britan Can Make It exhibition of 1946. London: Leicester University Press, 1997. 8. The exhibition toured to Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham College of Arts & Crafts, and the Geffrye Museum in East London, indicative of BIAE ’s target audience. 9. For example, Clark’s address to the Council for Visual Education, 6 May 1947: ‘the design produced in a country . . . is a reflection of certain conditions of climate, landscape, atmosphere and race’ RIBA Journal, July 1947, 474–475. 10. Hendy was then Director of Leeds Museums (1934–1946), later taking on Clark’s role as Director of the National Gallery (1946–1967). 11. The Circulation Department did not re-open until January 1947. Joanna Weddell’s research investigates the V&A’s work in displaying and collecting contemporary design in the post-war period. See Chapter 2.

References Archival sources Victoria and Albert Museum, London Arts Council of Great Britain archive (ACGB, subgroup EL) EL 1/2 ‘Notes on the policy and structure of the Committee and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts’. EL 1/3 ‘Minutes for 1st–6th meetings of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts’. EL 1/6 ‘Minutes for 1st–20th meetings of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts’. EL 1/15 CEMA Council Papers 126–150. EL 1/17 CEMA Council Papers 176–200. EL 1/20 ‘The Arts in War-time: A Report of the Work of CEMA 1942–1943’. EL 2/1 Art Advisory Panel. Tate Archive, London TGA 8812 Kenneth Clark Archive TGA 8812/1/1/44 ‘Correspondence File Misc D’, 1944. TGA 8812/1/4/126 ‘Correspondence File for the Council of Industrial Design’. TGA 8812/2/2/47 ‘Art Appreciation – for the Wykehamist’, July 1953. TGA 8812/2/2/991 ‘Exhibition of CEMA Pictures’, 7 September 1942. National Archives, Kew BT 64 Board of Trade: Industries and Manufactures Department: Correspondence and Papers. Subseries: Reconstruction of Industry BT 64/1573 ‘Council of Industrial Design: selection and appointment of foundation members’. ED 136 Board of Education and successors: Private Office: Files and Papers (Series II). Subseries: Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts ED 136/188A ‘Minutes of Meetings of the Arts Panel. Exhibition Pamphlets’. ED 136/188B ‘Miscellaneous Correspondence’.

12

Kenneth Clark and Design National Gallery Archive, London NG 1/12 Minutes of the Board of Trustees. University of Brighton Design Archives, Brighton Design Council Archive: DCA ‘Design At Home exhibition of furniture and furnishing’. Exhibition catalogue. Arts Council/CEMA , 1945. DCA /14A/312 ‘Summer Exhibition 1946’. DCA /14/14[E1] ‘Exhibition Committee’ (Director’s File). DCA /42/289 ‘Design and Exhibitions Committee’.

Published sources Attfield, J. (ed.) (1999) Utility Reassessed: The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Black, M. (ed.) (1950) Exhibition Design. London: Architectural Press. Breakell, S. (2015) ‘ “The Exercise of a Peculiar Art-Skill”: Kenneth Clark’s Design Advocacy and the Council of Industrial Design’. Visual Culture in Britain, 16(1), 42–66. Clark, K. (1944) ‘Artist and Patron’, Sunday Times, 2 March 1944. Cotton, M. (2010) Design Research Unit 1942–72. London: Cubitt Gallery/Koenig Books. Council of Industrial Design. Council of Industrial Design First Annual Report 1945–1946. Davies, V. (2008) ‘ “Steering a Progressive Course?” Exhibitions in Wartime and Postwar Britain’, a paper delivered at ‘Sculpture in the Home’, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 5 December 2008. Available online: http://www.henry-moore. org/hmi/online-papers/papers/veronica-davies (Accessed 13 April 2013). Hutchinson, R. (1982) The Politics of the Arts Council. London: Sinclair Browne. Maguire, P. J. and Woodham, J. M. (1997) Design and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain: The Britan Can Make It Exhibition of 1946. London: Leicester University Press. Weddell, J. (2012) ‘Room 38A and Beyond: Post-war British Design and the Circulation Department’. V&A Online Journal, 4, Summer 2012. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-4summer-2012/room-38a-and-beyond-post-war-british-design-and-the-circulation-department (Accessed 16 February 2013). Weingartner, J. (2006) The Arts as A Weapon of War: Britain and the Shaping of Morale in the Second World War. London: IB Tauris. White, E. (1975) The Arts Council of Great Britain. London: Davis Poynter. Whitworth, L. (2004) ‘Anticipating Affluence: Skill, Judgment and the Problem of Aesthetic Tutelage’. In Black, L. and Pemberton, H. (eds), An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War Golden Age Revisited. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing (pp. 167–184). Witts, R. (1998) Artist Unknown: An Alternative History of the Arts Council. London: Warner Books. Woodham, J. (2004) ‘Design and Everyday Life at the Britain Can Make It Exhibition, 1946: “Stripes, Spots, White Wood and Homespun Versus Chintzy Armchairs and Iron Bedsteads with Brass Knobs”. Journal of Architecture, 9(4), 463–476.

13

14

CHAPTER 2 THE ETHOS OF THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 1947–1960 Joanna Weddell

Until government cuts in 1977, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) had an historic commitment to regional design education, successfully fulfilled by its Circulation Department, which sent small and large touring exhibitions to museums and art schools around the UK (Weddell 2012). The Circulation Department grew from the collections of art and design formed at the Central School of Design from 1837, founded with the aim of reforming industrial design to compete with foreign markets. These collections circulated around the UK to Government Schools of Design and were incorporated into the South Kensington Museum, later the V&A – Floud cites 1848 as the start of Circulation, its origins therefore pre-date the Museum (Floud 1949:7). In 1849 Henry Cole gave evidence to the Select Committee on the Schools of Design saying: ‘I do not think that these schools were created for aesthetic purposes, or for general educational purposes. I apprehend that the age is so essentially commercial, that it hardly looks to promoting anything of this kind except for commercial purposes’ (Sheppard 1975:74–96). In a choice between Art and Industry, it would seem that Industry won and, as others have observed, the Museum was ‘redolent of the modernity of international exhibitions, the department store, liberal economics, technical design education and utilitarian reform ideology [as well as] the more traditional curatorial and aesthetic motivations’ (Barringer 2006:133–145). This chapter discusses the Circulation Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the period 1947 to 1960, under Keeper Peter Floud CBE (1911–1960), when Circulation (familiarly known as ‘Circ’) was the largest department of the V&A. The Department’s ethos has been articulated as left-wing in outlook and organization, with many staff being members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (until the Hungarian uprising of 1956), and concerned to address the ‘working class’ as well as the elite scholarly connoisseur (Sandino 2013). Circ was egalitarian, for example promoting female staff members and having a less militaristic or paternalistic hierarchy than was usual in the Museum, and elsewhere in society, at that time (Adams 2010:28–42). The Department was concerned with social equality and access for all, for example through a system where all museums paid the same transport charge regardless of distance from South Kensington, and by ensuring that touring shows had free admission and full labels, to obviate the need for an expensive catalogue purchase. Innovative in its approach to scholarship, for example through the use of patent books to firmly date designs, Circ focused on Victorian and Edwardian design, unusually for the Museum at this date when acquisitions were largely pre-1830 (Burton 1981:54). Circ was engaged with the contemporary, being the only V&A department to seriously pursue the acquisition and display of new design objects during this period. I discuss some of the ways in which Circ’s exhibitions reflected this established ethos and go on to examine in detail the Department’s attitude to contemporary design and commerce. As evidence I use Floud’s published and unpublished writing, the Department’s travelling exhibitions and data from Circ’s acquisitions during this period. There seem to have been tensions and oppositions between Art and Industry, with ‘industrial design’ a particularly contested term.

15

Design Objects and the Museum

The Circulation Department 1947–1960 Peter Castle Floud was the dynamic and visionary Keeper of the Circulation Department between 1947 and 1960, developing a strong ethos of public service in the exhibitions programme and innovations in both display and acquisitions. Floud came from an establishment background, attending Gresham’s in Norfolk and taking a First in PPE at Wadham College, Oxford.1 Unsurprisingly, given his degree, Floud was politicized at Oxford and, in common with many of his generation, saw the Communist Party of Great Britain as a constructive alternative to Europe’s growing Fascism, being a member until 1956. In 1935 Floud joined the V&A as Assistant Keeper in Circ; after secondment from the Museum on war service, Floud returned to Circ in January 1947, but in charge as Keeper. Circ was a part of a broader post-war initiative by the Attlee government to promote ‘good design’ across the UK .2 At this date Museum staff were civil servants responsible to the Department of Education and Science and can be regarded as an arm of the state; for example, until 1983 all staff signed the Official Secrets Act. Touring art exhibitions were on the agenda for many European countries engaged in post-war reconstruction and Floud contributed to a special UNESCO publication on circulating exhibitions (Floud 1950). For Floud ‘Britain not only led the world’s industrial revolution: she has a unique record of selective exhibitions of industrial designs’ and such regular exhibition programmes should be ‘regarded by enlightened opinion as an essential part of progressive government’ (Floud 1953a:24–25). The Department’s offices and stores were housed in the Museum’s North Court and referred to as ‘an alternative museum, a museum broken up into small, coherent units, and constantly on the road’ (Vaizey 1972), perhaps a version of André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire with cases literally sent out beyond the museum walls (Malraux 1947). Circ occupied a position outside the main museum hierarchy, with staff having a leftwing bias and many being art school graduates rather than Oxford or Cambridge graduates, with the exception of Circ’s senior staff (Floud, Wakefield and Hogben). As one long-serving member of the Department, Barbara Morris, explained, Floud treated everyone as equals and emphasized ‘that we were there to help and educate the public’ rather than ‘pursuing curatorial interests for the sake of it’ (Sandino 2009). Unlike the main Museum departments, which, since re-organization in 1909, had fostered a connoisseur approach specializing in particular materials, Circ’s shows were an eclectic mix that not only physically broke away from the notion of an elitist, self-contained museum but also cut across the V&A’s established organizational structure. Floud pursued the aim of ‘progressive government’ through travelling exhibitions of both traditional art and commercially produced objects, sent out to the regions from the metropolitan centre of Albertopolis. The first time that a full listing of V&A travelling exhibitions appeared in Museums Journal in August 1949 (Vol. 49 No. 5), gives an indication of the geographic spread and range of Circulation exhibitions in the early stages of its operation under Floud. At this date the most northerly venue was Berwick-upon-Tweed, which received the History of Lithography; the most southerly was Hove, which saw Early English Watercolours; the most westerly was Carmarthen, which viewed Decorative Woven Textiles; and the most easterly was Norwich, which displayed a show of English Chairs. These towns and cities were hosting displays of the historical and the contemporary, the decorative and the commercial, a range of both Art and Industry for the education of the citizen. Circ travelling exhibitions were ‘specially prepared for the typical small general museum which needs non-specialist exhibitions, appealing to a completely uninformed public’. Such exhibitions were ‘supplied with much fuller and more didactic labels than would normally accompany a Victoria and Albert exhibition’ (Floud 1950:299). Arguably such explicit aims could be seen as patronizing to provincial galleries but, given an understanding of the aims of the department, this approach may be seen as pragmatic in promoting access for all, and perhaps stands as a comment on the predominant approach at South Kensington. 16

The V&A Circulation Department 1947−1960

Figure 2.1 History of Lithography at Bolton Art Gallery, September 1950; V&A Archive MA /19/4 Photographs of exhibitions from 1956– 63 in England and Scotland. Joanna Weddell © courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Typical of Circ’s methodology was one of the early exhibitions curated under Floud, ‘150 Years of Lithography’, 1948. Circ commissioned a poster to promote the show at regional museums from Charles Mozley and this became an exhibit in its own right, demonstrating the auto-lithograph process using successive printings (C.17459.C).3 The show included fifty frames and three technical exhibits, including an innovative collapsible revolving display case. The show was a combination of scholarly, historical objects, which Circ emphasized were ‘rare early prints’, illustrations of the techniques of production and up-to-date examples of contemporary printing from both home and abroad. Here we see the Department promoting a scholarly approach to art objects, improving industry and shaping the citizen’s ‘good taste’, by negotiating between art and industry, society and the market and disseminating design to the regions. In practice then, the ethos of Circ was based on three principal elements: on scholarship, for unique, securely provenanced, aesthetic objects; on material and process, supporting students, industry, export and commerce; and on contemporary design, shaping the ‘good taste’ of the ideal citizen as an arm of progressive government.

Floud and contemporary design objects Floud was a pioneering scholar and curator as seen in Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Art, the major exhibition held at South Kensington in 1952 (which also toured), and his view of designers such as William 17

Design Objects and the Museum

Morris was clear-eyed. In 1954 Floud used the democratic medium of radio to broadcast his conclusions that, contrary to Arts and Crafts principles, Morris & Co. did not produce ‘individual craftwork, but rather what one can call serial hand-production on a factory basis, which makes full use of the division of labour and differs very little in its moral and social implications from straight-forward machine-production’ (Floud 1954a,b). Floud’s concern for ‘moral and social implications’ prompts an assessment of Circ’s acquisition of both unique craft objects and mass-produced industrial designs. Circ’s acceptance of the commercial may have more in common with Cole’s earlier aims for the circulating collections, where opposition between the commercial and aesthetic had yet to harden, and where conflict between scholarly endeavour and wicked industry had yet to skewer the Museum. Under Floud’s leadership we see a Departmental understanding of the ‘moral and social implications’ of different kinds of production (craft and industrial), backed by a Keeper with a commitment to social justice (despite, or at this date one might say because of, his background) working within a state milieu favouring the promotion of good modern design across the nation. Unlike other Museum departments, which had an unofficial ‘fifty year rule’ against purchasing recent objects, Circ had continued the founding mission to collect contemporary design as an educational resource for manufacturers, designers and the public. At the start of the post-war period Floud could already write that ‘the Circulation Department’s contemporary collections are now much more extensive than those of the main Museum’ (Floud post-1949:3). By 1955, at about the middle of Floud’s tenure as Keeper, nearly 75 per cent of Circ’s acquisitions were of contemporary or modern objects produced in the previous ten years. Nuancing this apparent embrace of the contemporary, Floud argued a distinction between the decorative aesthetic object and industrial commercial design. In 1957 the Council of Industrial Design (CoID, later the Design Council) proposed that the winners of their contemporary design awards were to be acquired by the V&A. Floud stated that ‘we never have been and are not now a museum of industrial design . . . [the Museum] has always in fact been a museum of the decorative arts and never acquired objects which could be regarded as the nineteenthcentury precursors of the twentieth-century concept of industrial design’ (Benton 1997:309–328). Floud expressed reservations about the type of objects that would be appropriate and planned to ‘limit our acceptance to objects which could be regarded as forming part of the normal equipment of a living room’, rejecting the idea of displaying ‘washing machines in the same building as, for example Renaissance sculpture’ (Crowther 2012:11–13). Here Floud is defining acceptable design objects by their use not by their method of production; he continued ‘we should certainly not normally have acquired . . . pyrex ovenware or . . . melmex tableware . . . the majority of articles in Design [Magazine] now involve a range of expertise quite outside the orbit even of those of us here who cover the contemporary decorative arts’ (Benton 1997:309–328). In contrast to this apparent rejection of utilitarian industrial design as part of the Museum’s canon, Circ had in fact acquired a Pyrex ovenware casserole in 1949, by the simple expedient of walking across the road to Harrods and spending five shillings and sixpence (Circ.160&A-1949).4 Earlier, in 1948, Circ had also toured ‘A small exhibition showing examples of good modern design in pottery, glass and textiles’, in effect, massproduced objects for the domestic interior that had much in common with the Museum of Modern Art’s series of Useful Objects exhibitions that toured the US and featured Pyrex from 1942 (Staniszewski 1999).5 In spite of Floud’s reaction when faced with the CoID winners in 1957, in a 1949 article published in an American magazine, while avoiding the term ‘industrial design’, Floud had acknowledged that ‘the loan collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum include large collections of contemporary decorative and industrial art’ (Floud 1949:7). Circ’s post-war shows exhibited some British objects that were produced solely for export, as rationing precluded their sale in the UK , for example, Tablewares of Today, 1952, which would be ‘new to the public since most of the best British wares are for “export only” and most of the foreign wares cannot normally be 18

The V&A Circulation Department 1947−1960

Figure 2.2 Contemporary Scandinavian Furnishing Fabrics at Manchester Regional College of Art, September 1956; V&A Archive MA /19/4 Photographs of exhibitions from 1956–63 in England and Scotland. Joanna Weddell © courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

imported into this country’.6 These travelling shows toured to museums, galleries and public libraries to influence and educate the consumer, promoting British products and consumption. In 1956 the Department exhibited the first of a series of contemporary exhibitions described as ‘industrial wares, which have been recently designed in a modern spirit’, shown at South Kensington but demoted to the Restaurant not the main galleries, and for later regional circulation. As with MoMA’s precedent, these were on open display units rather than in locked cases, closer to a department store display than a museum environment (Wakefield 1957:243– 244). The series later included national surveys of fabrics and wallpaper, bringing international design to art and design students and citizens across the UK as rationing and import restrictions were lifted. These contemporary touring collection displays may be seen to act as a distanced but authoritative locus for a meeting between commercial industry and decorative design, allowing them to avoid categorization as a straightforward agent of commodification or aestheticization (Wood 1996). Floud and his team undertook extensive research into Victorian and Edwardian design, a field at that time ignored by other V&A departments (Burton 1981:54), establishing a reputation for innovative and thorough scholarship brought to fruition in the 1952 Exhibition of Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts. Over 24,000 people attended the exhibition at South Kensington, which then travelled around the UK in various forms, for example Victorian Pottery, 1954. The original scheme was to cover the period from 1851 to 1951 and Floud proposed that: ‘The Exhibition would not, of course, be limited to hand-made objects, but would also include machine-made textiles, commercially-produced ceramics, etc. These latter would, 19

Design Objects and the Museum

however, only be included if they were the work of known designers’.7 To establish secure provenance Floud used contemporary press reports and doggedly followed up the descendants of those who had bought or commissioned work from significant design pioneers, successfully persuading many to loan or gift objects to the Museum. In an internal memorandum Floud describes other scholarly efforts in the field including Pevsner’s as ‘very superficial’, explicitly rejecting a ‘modish display of bric-a-brac’ and contrasting Circ’s ‘scientific and objective approach to the period’ with the ‘fashionable dilettantism’ of others such as Grigson and Betjeman.8 Floud’s original scheme further illuminates his attitude to contemporary commercial design. He hoped that: The Final section of the Exhibition [up to 1951] would include a certain number of articles usually regarded as examples of ‘Industrial Design’, but only in so far as these fall within the field normally covered by this Museum. (e.g. it would include one of Ambrose Heal’s early tubular-steel chairs, and Well [sic] Coates’ early wireless-cabinet, because these are both examples of furniture, but kitchenequipment, electric-irons, etc., would be excluded).9 There would be no attempt to include ‘the routine everyday productions of the period’ but rather objects that were ‘in advance of popular taste’ and of ‘some solid merit as the work of serious designers’.10 In this context industrial design is acceptable to the Museum canon, when defined by its use and design source rather than by method of production. Here the Circ ethos seems open to mass-produced design objects, as long as they are by a significant pioneering designer and not for the kitchen.

Floud and craft It can be seen that there is some evidence of Circ maintaining the tradition of Cole’s ‘commercial purposes’ in its circulation of technical exhibits, and pursuing ‘educational and aesthetic purposes’ through both historic scholarship and the acquisition of contemporary design objects. In the catalogue to the Exhibition of Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts Floud noted Morris’s ‘crusade against the debased standards of mid-Victorian mass-production’, which Morris attributed to ‘the influence of machine-manufacture and the disappearance of . . . hand-craftsmanship’. Further Morris’s doctrine was that ‘true design must be based on an understanding of technical processes’ (Floud 1952:38, 115). However, Floud was clearly concerned about the state of contemporary industrial design and, on the occasion of the anniversary of The Studio, took the opportunity of comparing Arts and Crafts doctrine in 1893 and 1953. Floud explicitly separated design from production, with no bias towards the handmade over the machine, or towards art rather than industry, writing: the main pivot of current Arts and Crafts doctrine, and indeed the main criterion normally employed today in defining craft-work – namely the identity of designer and craftsman – received little attention in 1893. The founders of the Society . . . never executed their own designs, but invariably turned them over to commercial firms . . . or to professional craftsmen or women . . . present-day Arts and Crafts doctrine, by emphasizing individualistic and subjective criteria, and especially by insisting on the identity of designer and executants, defines the crafts much more narrowly than did the accepted theory of 1893. It would be valuable if the movement took the opportunity . . . to consider the extent, if any, to which the present difficult – and indeed discouraging – position of so many of the crafts is connected with this change (Floud 1953b:126–135). 20

The V&A Circulation Department 1947−1960

Floud articulates his view that a neglect of the ‘craft’ of design for machine production leads to a decline in the quality of objects and that ‘known designers’ should pay attention to this issue in the cause of a professional and commercial approach. The distinction for him is between ‘furniture born at the bench’ or the machinemade born ‘at the drawing board’. In 1892 Walter Crane had described craft as ‘a protest against the domination of our modern commercial and industrial system of production for profit’ under a ‘commercial democracy’, a rejection of ‘the production of the greatest saleable quantity for the greatest purchasing number, without regard to quality or durability’ (Crane 1892:64–67). Conceptualizing craft as part of a rejection of capitalist values is problematic as Floud recognized when Morris’s socialist beliefs about the division of labour did not prevent Morris & Co. from ‘serial hand-production’ of wallpaper. Floud is critical of the attractions of the idealized craft-worker as designer/maker and concerned by the implications of this insistence on individuality. The Circ attitude to craft and to mass-produced industrial design under Floud is further articulated in a 1956 travelling show of Hand-made Furniture, arranged by Circ with the Rural Industries Bureau. As well as unique craft objects, the displays showed new modern materials (a fibre-glass chair) and factory-production (stoneware). The catalogue demonstrated an appreciation of the historic context for the ‘moral and social implications’ of production together with openness to the use of factory or serial production and new manufacturing methods in pursuit of well-designed objects. In this circulating exhibition ‘neither the high rate of production . . . nor the new materials used . . . debar [objects] from the category of well-designed hand-made articles’.11 In a 1950 article on ‘The Development of Co-Operation between Museums and Industry’, Gordon Russell wrote that in ‘the important job of going out to meet industry. . . . Much . . . would depend on the personality of the curator’ (Russell 1950:172–176). After the 1952 Victorian and Edwardian show, Floud pursued research in the field of textiles where a collaboration with Manchester’s textile trade association, the Cotton Board, resulted in the 1955 exhibition English Chintz: Two Centuries of Changing Taste, held in Manchester. Floud continued these studies at the Patent Office where, in a breakthrough of scholarship, he pioneered the accurate dating of textiles through previously unused records. The fruits of this scholarship were seen in the May 1960 exhibition English Chintz: Fabrics from their Origins until the Present Day, shown at the V&A and later touring, produced by Morris according to Floud’s plans. The show was posthumous as Floud died suddenly of a brain tumour at the start of the year with obituaries referring to his loss to the ‘textile industry’ (Noel White 1960: 63–64). Floud’s last exhibition brought innovations in display too, with contemporary fabrics displayed on a moving rail. The show also included fabrics commissioned specially for the exhibition to bring the historic tradition up to date, such as Halcyon by Lucienne Day for Heal’s, said to be loosely inspired by a late-eighteenthcentury pattern in the Museum. What then can we conclude about Circ’s ethos in relation to contemporary design objects? When constructing Circ shows Floud takes care to include the ‘machine-made’ and ‘commercially produced’ object when it is by a ‘known designer’. Contemporary industrial design is to be part of Circ’s remit, even though limited to objects used ‘upstairs’ rather than ‘downstairs’, echoing the policy of other V&A departments. From Floud’s scholarly and detailed knowledge of Victorian design practice he accepts the separation of design and execution, and fears that the dominance of designer makers will lead to a decline in standards for mass-produced objects (used by the ordinary citizen). The output of ‘firms’, factories and workshops has a place equal to that of the individual ‘arts-craftsman’; technical experimentation to produce the ‘cheap, simple, utilitarian’ object is to be encouraged. For Floud, the innovative pioneering designer has a duty to address machine production and new materials, just as it follows that the Museum, as an arm of ‘progressive government’, has a duty to select and exhibit such objects. That the designer of the mass produced will be a ‘known’ and named individual is one of the tenets of modern forms of production. The ‘autonomous’ and independent designer, apparently operating beyond considerations of profit and cost, is paradoxically necessary for the production of additional value in everyday 21

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 2.3 ‘English Chintz’, Section IV, The Last Fifty Years 1910–1960 at the V&A, 1960; V&A Archive MA /19/4 Photographs of exhibitions from 1956–63 in England and Scotland. Joanna Weddell © courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

objects. The model of craft as protest was ably deconstructed by Floud in his studies of Morris as he refers to ‘the gigantic all-embracing contradiction of capitalism itself ’ (Floud 1960). Original creative expression and commodification for profit are not mutually exclusive; the ethical and the economic are interrelated. Craft’s position as the oppositional anti-industrial ‘other’ was itself a creation (Adamson 2013). In the post-war period Floud and Circ can be regarded as part of a state framework that negotiates with the markets of mass production for their absorption into culture. Floud can be seen to question the total autonomy of the creative designer and to emphasize the need for cultural objects to be produced not just in the interest of profit and commodification but also as part of the effective incorporation of the mechanized into society. Following Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian approach (Bennett 1995), the Circulation Department may be seen as placed at the centre of modern relations between culture and government, where Floud’s project was both ethical production and economic growth, an instrument of social governance in line with the ‘new museology’. Keeper Peter Floud’s membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (until 1956) and the art school background of members of the Circulation Department during this period may argue for an inclusive social purpose rather than a crudely didactic aim of supporting existing hierarchies of institutional taste and authority. Bennett quotes Foucault: ‘To work with a government implies neither subjection nor global acceptance. One can simultaneously work and be restive.’ Circ’s left-wing art school staff may fit Bennett’s category of ‘cultural technicians’ who practise and negotiate principled, policy-oriented pragmatism (Bennett 1992:395–408). 22

The V&A Circulation Department 1947−1960

While the Museum’s exhibition and acquisition policies continue to evolve (Long 2013), Floud’s Circ ethos is significant in that it has defined the larger part of the V&A’s holdings of post-war design. From 1960, under Hugh Wakefield’s Keepership and through the energy of Carol Hogben, the Department continued to acquire and tour contemporary design during an age not dissimilar to Cole’s, being ‘so essentially commercial’. The definition of industrial design expanded to include the kitchen equipment that was so questionable in 1957 but Floud’s aims for ‘progressive government’ held good. In a characteristically Circ attitude to the ‘canon’, as a counter to the nationalism of the now-accessioned Design Council Award (DCA ) winners (from 1962), travelling shows such as Industrial Design International, 1971, and Design Review, 1975, imported awardwinning mass-produced consumer items and specifically excluded British goods. Circ’s post-war state-sponsored ethos can therefore be seen to occupy a unique position in museology.

Acknowledgements This chapter draws on my AHRC funded collaborative doctoral research ‘Disseminating Design’, supervised by Professor Jonathan Woodham, University of Brighton, Ghislaine Wood, Victoria and Albert Museum, with support from Professor Christopher Breward, Edinburgh College of Art. I am grateful to the staff of the NAL and the V&A Archive, to Linda Sandino, and to former members of Circ: Carol Hogben, Geoff and Jennifer Opie, David Coachworth, Betty Elzea and Elizabeth Knowles.

Notes 1. Peter Floud’s father was Sir Francis Floud KCB KCSI KCMG , a high-ranking civil servant appointed British High Commissioner to Canada. Oxford Class lists show Floud’s graduation, ‘University News’, the Times, 28 July 1933, 16, The Times Digital Archive (Accessed 12 January 2012). With thanks to Liz Larby, Archivist, Gresham’s School. The film ‘Benjamin Britten: Peace and Conflict’, 2013, shows Gresham’s, see: http://www.benjaminbrittenfilm.co.uk/ the-film/directors-statement/ 2. For example, the BBC Radio broadcasts on design aimed at schools ‘Looking at Things’, 1949–1950, and the ship Campania that toured the Festival of Britain to ten British ports, 1951. 3. To quote from the Prospectus for Museums: ‘This exhibition has been made up from material assembled for the exhibition shown in the Victoria and Albert Museum to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the invention of lithography. It is a self-contained survey of the art from its invention to the present day, and includes technical exhibits illustrating the process of lithography. Many rare early prints, and examples of the finest work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, etc., as well as examples of contemporary English and French work are included.’ The exhibition display can be seen at Bolton Art Gallery, September 1950 in the V&A Archive file MA /19/4P.1.‘150 Years of Lithography’, poster, Charles Mozley, 1948, auto-lithograph Museum no. C.17459.C. 4. See Circ.160&A-1949, Casserole and cover of pressed heat-resisting glass, Pyrex Ltd, 1949 From Messrs Harrods Ltd, Brompton Road, Knightsbridge SW 1, price 5s 6d, on display Glass, Room 131, Case 81, Shelf 5. 5. ‘A small exhibition showing examples of good modern design in pottery, glass and textiles from the loan collection of the Circulation Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington’, 18 August 1948. Ref 22226101H. MoMA had shown Pyrex in Useful Objects in Wartime, 2 December 1942–3 January 1943, the fifth annual exhibition of objects under $10. See Catalogue No. 65: http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/843/ releases/MOMA _1942_0085_1942-11-30_421130-78.pdf?2010 MOMA also showed Pyrex in the 1955 American Art of the Twentieth Century, 1955, see Catalogue No. 304, under ‘Kitchen Equipment’ http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/1905/ releases/MOMA _1955_0020.pdf?2010 (Accessed 21 July 2014).

23

Design Objects and the Museum 6. MA /17/2/3 Victoria and Albert Museum, Circulation Department, Travelling Exhibitions for Loan to Museums, Art Galleries and Libraries, 1952. 7. MA /28/85/1 (formerly ME /29/42) Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts, 1949–1953, Part 1; Typescript signed P.C.F [Peter Castle Floud] dated 10 March 1950. 8. MA /28/85/1 (formerly ME /29/42) Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts, 1949–1953, Part 1; Typewritten memo from Peter Floud to Director, Leigh Ashton, dated 19 January 1952. 9. MA /28/85/1 (formerly ME /29/42) Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts, 1949–1953, Part 1; Typescript signed P.C.F [Peter Castle Floud] dated 10 March 1950. 10. NAL : NJ.94.0275 Victorian & Edwardian Decorative Arts, Small Picture Book No. 34, October 1952; Pages 3 and 4, Introduction, initials ‘PF ’ for Peter Floud. 11. MA /18/1/5 ‘Hand-made Furniture’ From the Permanent Collection of the Rural Industries Bureau; An exhibition arranged by the Victoria and Albert Museum, from 1956: The majority of the exhibits are unique pieces, made individually by country craftsmen using the traditional raw materials, tools and equipment available to rural workshops. They represent a tradition handed down by those who, following the reaction of nineteenth-century thinkers against factory methods, chose to isolate themselves from the mass market and to work not so much for profit as for the satisfaction to be gained from mastery of materials and tools. On the other hand some of the pottery, among it the traditional kitchen stoneware from Derbyshire, though hand-thrown, is made in series in a factory, with a daily output per man of several dozens. The fibre-glass chair, meanwhile, is made by methods which have been in the hands of furniture-makers only for two or three years, and its inclusion illustrates an attitude to hand-made articles which so far has been more widely accepted abroad than in this country. Nevertheless, neither the high rate of production of the pottery nor the new materials used in the chair debar them from the category of well-designed hand-made articles.

References Adams, R. (2010) ‘The New Girl in the Old Boy Network: Elizabeth Esteve-Coll at the V&A’. In Levin, A. (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader (pp. 28–42). Available online: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ cmci/people/papers/adams/newgirl.pdf (Accessed 22 June 2015). Adamson, A. (2013) The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury. Barringer, T. (2006) ‘Victorian Culture and the Museum: Before and After the White Cube’: Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 January 2006. Bennett, T. (1992) ‘Useful Culture’. Cultural Studies, 6(3), 395–408. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge. Benton, C. (1997) ‘ “An Insult to Everything the Museum Stands for” or “Ariadne’s Thread” to “Knowledge” and “Inspiration”? Daniel Libeskind’s Extension for the V&A and Its Context. Part II ’. Journal of Design History, 10(3), 309–328. Burton, A. P. (1981) (ed.) Victoria and Albert Museum, Review of the Years 1974–1978. London: HMSO. Cole, H., quoted in P.P. (1849), XVIII , Minutes of Select Committee of House of Commons on the Schools of Design, qu. 3296, Sheppard, F.H.W. (ed.) ‘South Kensington and the Science and Art Department’, Survey of London: volume 38: South Kensington Museums Area, English Heritage 1975 (pp. 74–96). Available online: http://www.british-history. ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47518 (Accessed 9 April 2012). Crane, W. (1892) The Claims of Decorative Art. London: Lawrence and Bullen. Available online: http://archive.org/ stream/claimsofdecorati00cran/claimsofdecorati00cran_djvu.txt (Accessed 22 June 2015). Crowther, L. (2012) Award Winning British Design 1957–1988. London: V&A Publishing. Floud, P. (1949) ‘Lending by Victoria and Albert Museum’. Museum News, American Association of Museums, 26, 15 February 1949. Floud, P. (post-1949) Keeper of Circulation, V&A Museum Circulation Department, Its History and Scope. London: V&A, Curwen Press.

24

The V&A Circulation Department 1947−1960 Floud, P. (1950) ‘The Circulation Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum’. Museum, III (4), 299, ‘Museums and circulating exhibitions’, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, Paris, UNESCO publication 852. Floud, P. (1952) Catalogue of an Exhibition of Victorian and Edwardian Decorative Arts. London: HMSO. Floud, P. (1953a) ‘British Exhibitions of Selected Designs’. Design, March 1953, 24–25. Floud, P. (1953b) ‘The Crafts Then and Now’. The Studio, CXLV (721), 126–135. Floud, P. (1954a) ‘William Morris as an Artist: A New View’, The Listener, 7 October 1954; broadcast on Third Programme 19 September 1954. Floud, P. (1954b) ‘The Inconsistencies of William Morris’, The Listener, 52, 615; broadcast on Third Programme 25 September 1954. Floud, P. (1960) Talk delivered at the Art Workers’ Guild, 18 November 1955, quoted in NAL Box III 199.C ‘Tributes to Peter Floud, The Published writings of Peter Floud, The Wallpaper Designs of William Morris, an article by Peter Floud, reprinted from The Penrose Annual, Volume 54, 1960’. Dublin: William Morris Society. Long, K. (2013) ‘Rapid Response Collecting’, interview by Rose Etherington. Dezeen, 18 December 2013. Available online: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/18/rapid-response-collecting-victoria-and-albert-museum-kieran-long/ (Accessed 22 June 2015). Malraux, A. (1947) La Psychologie de l’art [series] vol. I: Le musée imaginaire. Geneva: Skira. Trans Gilbert, S. (1949) Museum without Walls, Vol. 1 of Psychology of Art, New York: Pantheon. Museums Journal, 49(5): listing of temporary exhibitions. Noel White, J. (1960) (Deputy Director, CoID ), ‘Peter Floud Obituary’. Design, Council of Industrial Design, 136, 63–64. Russell, G. (1950) ‘The Development of Co-Operation between Museums and Industry’. In The Museums Journal, 50(8), 172–176, paper discussed at the Biennial Conference of ICOM , London. Sandino, L. (2009) ‘News from the Past: Oral History at the V&A’. V&A Online Journal, 2, Barbara Morris, oral history interview by Linda Sandino, 26 January 2009. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/researchjournal/issue-02/news-from-the-past-oral-history-at-the-v-and-a/ (Accessed 22 June 2015). Sandino, L. (2013) ‘Art School Trained Staff and Communists in the V&A Circulation Department, c1947–1958’. In Sandino, L. and Pye, M. (eds), Artists Work in Museums: Histories, Interventions, Subjectivities. Bath: Wunderkammer Press, pp. 92–102. Sheppard, F. H. W. (1975) (ed.) ‘South Kensington and the Science and Art Department’, Survey of London, 38, South Kensington Museums Area. English Heritage (pp. 74–96). Available online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=47518 (Accessed 9 April 2012). Staniszewski, M. A. (1999) The Power of Display, a History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Vaizey, M. (1972) ‘National Loan Service’. Arts Review, London, 29 January 1972. Wakefield, H. (1957) ‘Open Display’. Museums Journal, 56, 243–244. Weddell, J. (2012) ‘Room 38A and Beyond: Post-war British Design and the Circulation Department’. V&A Online Journal, 4. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-4-summer-2012/ room-38a-and-beyond-post-war-british-design-and-the-circulation-department (Accessed 22 June 2015). Wood, P. (1996) ‘Commodity’. In Nelson, R. S. and Shiff, R. (eds), Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, pp. 382–406.

25

26

CHAPTER 3 ‘I WOULD SUGGEST THAT YOU SHOULD NOT THINK OF THE DESIGN CENTRE AS A MUSEUM; IT IS A LIVE, ACTIVE, MOVING THING’ 1: DESIGNS OF THE YEAR , 1957 Ness Wood

This chapter examines the choice of twelve everyday domestic products given the accolade Designs of the Year, and engages with emerging debates about what was deemed ‘good design’ and ‘good taste’, revealing conflicting interpretations of contemporary design as a notion of modernity or tradition. It is an investigation of the internal politics of the Council of Industrial Design (COID ) with its ethos of providing advice to the public. Exploring the role of the designer, the promotion of the manufacturer and whether consumption was good for the nation, the issues are drawn together through the lens of one exhibition in the post-rationing era. At the Design Centre opening ceremony on Haymarket, London in 1956, Mr Peter Thorneycroft, President of the Board of Trade said, ‘I would suggest that you should not think of the Design Centre as a museum; it is a live, active, moving thing.’2 There were different opinions about what a museum should be and Thorneycroft appears to have been proposing that museum practice of the period was uninspiring, static and focused on the past. A year after the opening, a collection of objects were picked for the ‘anniversary exhibition’, Designs of the Year, to honour and celebrate the first year of the Design Centre.3 The selection was described as highly commended by the exhibition committee, and was to be revealed within the main display of other products classified as well designed.4 By developing this awards process, the COID was signalling to consumers which specific products should be valued and regarded as ‘good design’. The exhibition gave consumers the opportunity to view these desirable commodities, as well as details of where they might be purchased.5 The standards of what was considered to be ‘good design’ in the twentieth century stemmed from groups of promoters or design reformers ‘professionalizing the practice of design’ (Attfield 1996). Groups such as the Designers and Industries Association (DIA ) and the Design Research Unit (DRU ) comprised enthusiasts who embraced industrial methods of production (Farr 1955; MacCarthy 1972; McGuirk 2010; Woodham 1983).6 With these initiatives, the role of the designer became more prominent and the promotion of ‘good design’ was seen as social improvement; not only did it encourage the acquisition of goods but design professionals assumed that they were giving the public what it needed (Attfield 2007:15). Indeed, this leading of the public to believe that one design was better than another was a significant attempt to steer the nation by professionals fearful of the mass consumption of undesirable products. There were exceptions to this position; earlier Nikolaus Pevsner had asked, ‘what legitimate reason have we for feeling in the least concerned about better design? Why not leave it as bad as it is?’ (Pevsner 1937:9–12).7 In contrast, Herbert Read, in a DIA conference speech of the same year stated: ‘You may take a horse to the trough, but you cannot make him drink. All our efforts to improve design are useless unless we can persuade the public to adopt them.’8 This position translated into a dilemma that preoccupied design through the 1950s, reliant as it was on a coherent definition or actual grouping that is the ‘public’ (Read 1967:9,188–198). The vision was to find ways to engage this public in the understanding of both design and production, and various competing design values highlighted as modern or traditional and cheap or expensive, taking into account aesthetics as well as function.9 27

Design Objects and the Museum

One of the COID’s main aims was the development of commercial standards in export and manufacturing, as Hugh Dalton emphasized in his speech at the inaugural meeting of the Council, ‘[both will] be the greater if our goods are planned and made . . . to meet the user’s real need, and to give pleasure in the using’.10 It was also hoped that a newly created permanent Design Centre would be opened, an idea that had been under consideration since 1943 (Woodham 1996).11 The Centre was to be set up to ‘keep abreast of progress, improve the quality of the products, and increase competitive power at home and abroad’.12 It was to be a space to display and promote well-designed products, and the COID felt that the ‘ordinary shopper’ would welcome the opportunity to view some of the best designed objects, and would find the Design Centre a useful source and guide to not wasting money on inferior products. It could be suggested that by setting up such a Centre the temptation was for people to spend money at a time when spending ought to be discouraged. However, the Council’s ethos was clear: ‘whatever the economic situation, we still have to replace things which wear out . . . [we] encourage people to buy better goods, not to buy more goods’.13 It is important to note that the paternalistic role the COID adopted was targeted towards the housewife14 and her role in assuring the economic future of the nation, with the best value for the housewife’s money high on the agenda.15 However, it was men who made up the highest proportion of visitors to the Centre. This could be due to the fact that a larger number of men were employed and worked in central London and that they ‘exerted a pervasive influence over a wide range of purchasing decisions’.16 At the opening of the Design Centre on Thursday 26 April, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh reiterated the promotion of national industry as much as the importance of ‘good design’ and he cemented the COID’s relationship with trade by emphasizing the manufacturer rather than the designer. This was to prove an important distinction in Designs of the Year.17 The Centre played a role in developing the concept of consumer choice by imposing professional working standards of taste on the public. This was exemplified by the fact that although the COID had advocated that ‘good design could be found at all price levels’ it presumed that visitors were aware of the Design Centre and the COID’s Design magazine and could afford to buy it.18 It seemed that it had also set out to appeal to those members of the public who were ‘partly converted, partly design conscious’.19 The COID’s predominant relationship to trade and manufacturers was established by the Centre, which promoted high standards of modern, mass-produced British products and emphasized that recently designed consumer goods epitomized quality. They explicitly invited the public to study new products in permanent and constantly changing temporary exhibitions; it was hoped that the Design Centre would not be ‘in competition with retail shops, for nothing would be sold over the counter’.20 The Centre also orchestrated a register called the ‘Design Index’, which was a reference directory for all featured products. This was seen to be an invaluable resource for retailers and for young couples setting up home (Reilly 1956; 1957).21 The Design Centre proved popular. The day after the official opening over 4,000 people visited and a queue formed in Haymarket. The list of products on show included items for the home and office: furniture, household textiles, radio and televisions, wallpapers, glass and travel goods.22 The dynamic of the exhibition in relation to traditional methods of display, such as those in museums, was altered as the chosen manufacturers would be charged a fee based on the size of the exhibit and the period it was on display. It was suggested that the manufacturers whose goods ‘reach the required standard for inclusion will therefore gain a national showing on very attractive terms’.23 A press release stated how the Centre was only a small part of the design and manufacturing industries and that a continual raising of standards would be needed as, ‘exhibitions of this kind will not by themselves improve design’.24 The opening received positive media coverage, and the Times was complimentary about the location. However, the press identified an early challenge for the COID, pointing out that they should practice what they preach, ‘finding itself in one of the ugliest massive office blocks’ (Times 1956). The Design Centre opened with over 1,000 products selected from 433 firms; enabling buyers to save time by seeing so many goods in one space.25 A guide to shopping was also produced for the housewife, which 28

The Design Council’s Designs of the Year, 1957

Figure 3.1 Designs of the Year, the Design Centre, London, 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archive.

stated that her intentions should be finding value for money, paying attention to new developments in plastics, textiles and new treatments for traditional materials and to look before she buys.26 This emphasis on value and new technology could connect to manufacturers’ ability to benefit from the mass production of these ‘modern’ consumer goods. The result of design information meant that in spite of (or perhaps because of) the successful conflation of production and promotion, the Design Centre was successfully established on its own terms, promoting products that apparently offered the consumer the best of British design and manufacturing (Morley 1990:96).27 For the Design Centre’s first anniversary exhibition the Design Centre Committee were asked to assemble photographs from the various industries displayed in the Centre, and choose up to three items from each category.28 The chosen products were to be considered of exceptional status and a hierarchical order of goods would emerge from this process. Initially titled Best Designs of the Year, it was felt that the proposal to give preferential treatment to certain exhibits in the display could be an unstable premise, the promotion of design along similar lines to fashion; seasonally and with a quick turnover of novel ideas.29 One way for the Selection Committee to relieve the situation was to select an external panel of judges, ones who were not directly connected to the COID. By 21 December 1956, it was decided that the panel would consist of three Royal Designers for Industry.30 The COID were aiming to create a collection, the crucial idea being that of selection, each piece was individual but it was also important that they related to each other and worked in unison. The 29

Design Objects and the Museum

Centre was an exhibition space displaying mass-produced domestic products and the objects were laid out in a way that combined retail store display and museum practice (Pearce 1992:5; Bennett 1998:61).31 For Designs of the Year, the objects were positioned on glass and plastic reflective shelving; overhead lighting enhanced their appearance; the display area was separated by screens; floors were carpeted and walls were of various colours. The exhibition section would be confined to single examples of each item with a relevant caption, showing the designer’s name, which appeared first, before the manufacturer.32 However, although the exhibition

Figure 3.2 Visitors to the Design Centre, 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archive.

30

The Design Council’s Designs of the Year, 1957

used some exhibition techniques, unlike the majority of museum exhibitions the visitors who attended the Centre could touch and handle the exhibits. In order to choose the products, an initial selection process for Designs of the Year took place. The Design Centre’s Industrial Officers (I.O.s) recommended 234 items; a Special Committee then whittled the list down to ninety-eight products. These were given to the panel of judges, which made a final choice of twelve. The judges were: Chairman Milner Gray, Professor R. Y. Goodden, Brian O’Rorke, Professor R. D. Russell and Astrid Sampe.33 Whilst the inclusion of women on the panel would be seen as an obvious choice due to the fact that women were the main market for many of these new products, and that the ideal consumer was ‘affluent, middle-class, female and white’ (Buckley 2007:13), there is little evidence that this was a consideration, and in the following year, 1958, the panel of judges did not include any women. Opportunities for women to participate in the design process were limited, and design activities that were understood to be masculine were more highly thought of. Although Sampe was a successful textile designer, she had to prove herself in this male environment. As Jill Seddon and Suzette Worden explain, working women were ‘fully subjected to the contradictions of the patriarchal society within which they lived’ and although they were writing about an earlier period, this still applied to women designers in the 1950s (Seddon and Worden 1994:7; Buckley 1986:4; Lewis 1992:114–121). The Sunday Times journalist Robert Harling criticized the judging process for having only one woman on the panel, suggesting that a non-designer woman could also have been involved (Harling 1957:20). Whether Sampe’s position as a judge was a last minute decision we cannot be sure but initially there were only to be three judges.34 On 22 March, the first of the two RDI selection processes took place with the second selection on 2 April 1957 when the RDI s viewed all the remaining items. This meeting proved significant as decisions were also made about other aspects of the display. It was decided that a certificate was to be awarded to the twelve manufacturers, and the designers would be overlooked. This seemed to be controversial as the COID’s aims were to engage with designers as a key part of the drive to promote British industry.35 In February 1957 Design magazine published an article titled, ‘Raising the Designer’s Status’ in which Sir Gordon Russell suggested that the status of the designer had advanced although he did state that there was opportunity for designers themselves to raise their position further (Russell 1957:47). This lack of recognition by the COID of the status of the designer at Designs of the Year could suggest a lack of comprehension of the role of the designer.36 This seems to be a contradiction since the COID had spent considerable time, resources and money after the war setting up exhibitions such as Britain Can Make It, 1946, and The Festival of Britain, 1951; exhibitions were held around the country explaining the role of the designer to the public, through lectures, events, talks and travelling displays (Woodham and Maguire 1997). It was stated frequently that ‘the status of the Festival was a turning point in public taste’ (Banham and Hillier 1976:26–38). In another surprising decision, the designers were omitted from the winning product captions; it was felt that to give the designers a degree of emphasis on the captions would ‘concentrate publicity on [the] designers themselves [and] would detract from the exhibits’.37 There is no evidence whether this omission was noted by any of the designers, although they were aware that the manufacturers received a certificate at a private ceremony as this information was noted in their invitation to the opening day. It was suggested that the exclusion of the designers was due to a lack of space at the private event. Regarding the status of designers, there appeared to be a lack of consistency: the decision to invite the designers at all suggests that they were seen to have made some contribution to the process; and the designers’ names appeared before the manufacturers on the captions, but they received no certificate.38 At this final selection process, it was stressed by the COID that the RDI s had to reach an agreement about the twelve objects, but they also stipulated which categories the RDI s should be representing in the final selection.39 Sampe was out of the country and so was not able to attend the meeting, and the other RDI s chose 31

Design Objects and the Museum

twenty-four products and reduced them to twelve. However, they wished Sampe to see all twenty-four and she returned briefly, viewing the selection before a final meeting. The RDI s drafted their final report and Sampe added a short piece to each point and the list of the final twelve was outlined on 9 April 1957. This report was posted to Sampe, and the list was as follows: Convector Open Fire Rayburn, Settee-bed Convertible, Casseroles Pyrex 1049 and 1067, Pendant Lamp Shade, Plastics Tableware Melmex, Axminster Broadloom

Figure 3.3 The report of the final selection, 9 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archive.

32

The Design Council’s Designs of the Year, 1957

Carpeting 9600, Cutlery and Flatware Pride, Table Glass Set Connoisseur, Dinner and Tableware Strawberry Hill, Television Receiver CS 17, Wallpaper Palladio and Cotton Fotexturprint.40 The judges aimed to show the public well-designed examples of things in common everyday use, although it was felt that one of the consequences was that the selection failed to reflect admiration for many other welldesigned goods. The judges were very specific about what versions of the twelve objects were to be displayed and this is significant due to their essential aim in the shaping of a harmonic modern home. On 12 April 1957 Sampe drafted a paper titled, ‘A Summary of My Thoughts on British Industrial Design of 1956’. Sampe’s summary was fairly positive. She felt that colour had played a role in creating ‘British standards of modern design’ and such influences came from feature articles particularly those in House and Garden magazine.41 She commented that the Design Centre was an important institution raising the significance of design in the world (Woodham 1997). However, on the first page of her draft paper, she gave an indication towards her preferences with regard to the final choices, ‘pure and simply designed objects would be preferable’. Even though Designs of the Year intended to highlight well-designed and contemporary products, the Scandinavian Sampe seemed to be contesting the British choice of the traditional versus the modern.42 She reflected on each of the items giving some products positive comments but critically reflecting on others. With regard to the ‘Pride’ cutlery (manufactured by Walker and Hall, designed by David Mellor), she loved the large spoon but thought the knives were not on an international design level.43 Regarding the ‘Melmex’ plastic soup or salad bowl, manufactured by Streetly Manufacturers Co. Ltd., and designed by Woodfull and Vale (of B.I.P. for Midwinter), Sampe thought that they did not reach the high standard of the plates and that the coffee cup looked out of place in the set. ‘Florilla’, the cotton/rayon fabric manufactured and designed by Tibor Reich was suggested as an excellent example of photo-print design, although Sampe would have liked the opportunity to have chosen from British manufacturers such as Edinburgh Weavers, or Lucienne Day’s designs for Heal’s. When it came to the Wedgwood dinner service, Sampe was very clear in her decision: ‘I voted against ‘Strawberry Hill.’ She commented that another Wedgwood design, ‘Summer Sky’, Queen’s Ware, would have been ‘more suitable to the modern home’, alongside the other eleven objects. The committee’s choice of Wedgwood seems to be what Sampe was referring to at the beginning of her summary. To her, the choice seemed out of alignment with the ethos of the COID, the vision of the committee and her own Swedish design aesthetic and experience. By 15 April there was a final ‘Progress Report’ that included ‘Astrid Sampe’s Minority Report’. This involved a consideration as to whether to publish Sampe’s comments regarding the designs, and it was agreed not to.44 Gray received a letter from Sampe, dated 25 April 1957, by which point she had returned to Sweden and had time to consider her thoughts. She stressed once more, ‘I find myself, as you know, in a very active disagreement with the committee’s decisions regarding the reward of No. 118 “Strawberry Hill” Dinner Service’, and went on to say, ‘If it were to be referred to the selection of the 12 Designs of the Year I feel I would lay myself open to considerable criticism in Scandinavia.’ For Sampe the choice of the Wedgwood set seemed incongruent with international design standards. Comparing the dinner service with the other winning objects plus the ceramics from Sampe’s homeland, the form and decoration of the set is of a very different style in shape and detail. Although functional, the ornate decoration and embellishment meant it did not have the same aesthetic considerations of the more minimalist pieces. Sampe felt so strongly that she asked for her disagreement about the Wedgwood pieces to be noted. It was hoped that ‘good taste’ would be represented across all twelve items but, as stated at the opening of the Design Centre, ‘anything shown here must be practical and reliable’, which the Wedgwood design was. The opening speech may contain some clues as to why the Wedgwood set’s aesthetic was deemed accessible: ‘Design must look right within the broad limits of current fashion and experienced taste’, and so Wedgwood was seen as the mature and steady choice among the contemporary styling of the other products.45 Russell thanked Sampe for her judging commitments and he also proposed that her criticism should be used 33

Design Objects and the Museum

in an article in Design.46 A concerned Gray wrote to Sampe ‘it would be a great pity if any differences in the views of the committee as a whole were over-emphasised. I am sure you will agree that . . . as an R.D.I Faculty panel, we should speak as one voice’.47 Sampe’s reservations about the choices gave rise to her comments and her views did differ from the rest of the judging panel. Her criticisms were consistent, setting out her modern design judging standards, which the male judges were perhaps less clear about. Sampe’s objections reveal that as a Swedish practitioner she felt that some of the standards of British design were not as advanced as in Sweden. In suggesting a different Wedgwood piece Sampe showed that she was in favour of this established British manufacturer and the chosen Wedgwood product was supported by the final press release, even though Sampe emphasized that another Wedgwood piece would have been ‘more suitable to the modern home’. Arguably, the fact the other members of the panel did not dismiss Sampe’s opinion could signal the high regard they held for her and possibly a compromise was reached by all. She did not feel strongly enough to remove herself from the awards process and did not want to suggest any falling out with the other judges, implying that it was a ‘technical difference of opinion’.48 It was a contentious matter for this particular selection of Wedgwood to be shown as a Design of the Year. The Guardian agreed, commenting: ‘How the Wedgwood exhibit ever came into this company would be a mystery to anyone unfamiliar with the deplorable attitude to design in the British potteries. Sure enough the Swedish guest member of the judges panel disassociates herself from their choice.’49 On 10 May 1957, the Duke of Edinburgh opened Designs of the Year stating: ‘I don’t think the selection committee had a particularly easy job. . . . I think we all hope that ultimately anybody who produces anything outstanding gets a certificate – the more people who produce good products the better.’50 The Designs of the Year press bulletin described the panel of judges as distinguished, and Russell printed Sampe’s reservations, as he had committed to do. In the final press release, the winners were described as: ‘component parts of the well furnished home; not designed to be shown off and looked at as collector’s pieces, but intended to take their proper place in a setting for every-day life . . . uppermost in our minds, however, were those of good appearance, sound workmanship, and suitability for the purpose and the particular market for which each article was designed.51 The twelve products chosen for the 1957 exhibition were the first objects to be given the Designs of the Year accolade, in a period of rapid change that saw the introduction of new materials and techniques and the development of consumer culture. These awards were a benchmark for the COID’s standards of design and helped define its role as public educator. Throughout the preparation for the exhibition and in the methods of selection the belief was that the public should not waste money on inferior domestic products, but instead choose from the Council’s selection of superior objects. The Council’s interpretation of ‘good design’ was presented as an answer to an uneducated public, which could rely on the expertise and competence of the COID even though it could be said to be more elite than popular. However, in spite of apparently transparent selection criteria, promoting the value of form and function as elements of ‘good design’, the 1957 awards reveal an inconsistency in the application of these criteria. Designs of the Year highlighted a central and enduring tension in the COID since it proposed the distinct nature of some goods while at the same time promoting their value as part of the everyday (Attfield 2000:13). The fact that the objects were ranked as the best British manufactured and designed products at that time gave them a different status from similar items not picked for the awards. The competing and changing interpretations of what was accepted as ‘good design’ reveals the instability of the concept, affected as it is by the complex nature of consumer choice and the varying criteria for the selection of specific objects. However, while subjective and reliant on the approved discernment of the judges, the Designs of the Year exhibition gave a post-war public the chance to experience the expanded choice of products at this time, and a position from which to make decisions about the home. 34

The Design Council’s Designs of the Year, 1957

Over the years the products in the awards reflected the changing world, with the number of awards and categories evolving, from domestic goods to street furniture, to boats and eventually computers. Designs of the Year ended in 1988 but the recognition of the importance of this type of award scheme is acknowledged. In 2007, the Design Museum, London began an annual Designs of the Year exhibition (although the selection process is significantly different), bringing together original designs across seven categories, featuring work from up-and-coming and well-known designers from around the world, and giving the public the chance to be part of the ‘social jury’ to vote for their favourite Designs of the Year. This exploration of Designs of the Year reveals some major themes. It shows that designed objects are often displayed in a manner different from that of a museum. The way that the products were selected, who selected them, and the fact that the manufacturers had to pay for this privilege, made this a very particular collection. The products needed to be contemporary and available, and regarded as ‘good design’ and ‘good taste’ but not necessarily fashionable. The selection criteria and the speed of the process help shape these awards, in which the inconsistencies are exemplified by the selection of Wedgwood’s ‘Strawberry Hill’, and the demotion of the status of the designers in the awards and exhibition process. A lack of coherent design aesthetic, with traditional, decorative tableware chosen above more consistently modern pieces, alongside careful collaboration with manufacturers throughout, prompts questions regarding the COID’s role as design reformer. The COID must be understood therefore as a problematic arbiter of what is ‘more suitable for the modern home’.52

Notes 1. DCA /Press Release no. IDG 44775510. Designs of the Year. 10 May 1957:3. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. Mr Peter Thorneycroft MP was the President of the Board of Trade. 2. DCA /Press Release no. IDG 44775510. Designs of the Year. 10 May 1957:3. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 3. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Gardner Medwin from Mr Johnston. 19 December 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. The Design Council Awards were originally titled Designs of the Year. However, ever since the Council of Industrial Design changed its name to the Design Council in 1972, these archive files have been known as the Design Council Awards Scheme or the Awards Scheme. 4. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter from A. Gardner Medwin, Chief Industrial Officer. ‘Anniversary of the Opening of the Design Centre’. 21 December 1956. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Williams, Mr Medwin, Mr Gregson, Mr McGeoghegan, Mr Johnston from Mr Reilly. 13 December 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. This itself caused some initial difficulty, raising the question as to whether any of the products already chosen to appear in the Design Centre should be given preferential treatment with an extra award. DCA /363/Letter to Mr Medwin from Mr Reilly. 13 December 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 5. Editorial, ‘Opening the Design Centre’, Design, 89: April 1956:46. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. Much of the information in this section is drawn from Design Council press releases, published articles about the Design Council, and Design Council leaflets, from the archive. 6. DIA was founded in 1915 and held its first exhibition of Design and Workmanship in Printing at the Whitechapel Gallery. Herbert Read set up the Design Research Unit in 1942 with Marcus Brumwell. Frank Murphy ‘Giving the Public What It Needs’, 25 September: 1 DIA First Weekend Conference September 24–26 1937. De La Warr Pavilion. Archive of Art and Design, London. 7. However, Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) believed that better design was ‘worth fighting for’ and he appreciated objects of ‘good and honest design’. 8. AAD /1997/7/66. Professor Herbert Read Design as a Social Factor. 24 September: 1 DIA First Weekend Conference September 24–26 1937. De La Warr Pavilion.

35

Design Objects and the Museum 9. Murphy suggested: ‘The beginning and end of good design was just sheer plain honesty.’ Read: ‘We know what good design is: its principles are simple and explicit in thousands of objects already created by human genius, from a Neolithic axe-head to a Greek temple, from a Wedgwood tea-cup to a Wellington bomber’ (1967:26). Noel Carrington commented in 1933: ‘Good design is largely a matter of common sense’ (1933:13). 10. COID First Annual Report 6. 1944. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 11. In fact, it had been suggested in the Weir Report (Report on Industrial Art and Design in Industry, 1943) to ‘establish and finance a pavilion of British Industrial art as a permanent building with changing exhibitions of the best modern design . . . the scope of these exhibitions should not be limited only to the field of the furnishings and decorative arts . . . but should cover the widest possible field’. See DCA _C(45) Council Meetings T(45) ‘Training Committee’ 1945:3. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. In June 1944, there was a Central Design Council, Federation of British Industries Proposal for ‘a Central Design Council and Industrial Design Centres . . . under “Exhibitions” (ii) ideally there should be in London, a special building for Exhibitions of Industrial Art. As an immediate practical step an existing building centrally situated should be utilized’. See DCA _C(45) Council Meetings T(45) ‘Training Committee’ 1945:3. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 12. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38965462. Prince Philip at the Design Centre. 10 May 1957:1. DCA _ID /10z(iii) ‘What is a Design Centre?’ 2. This was a description and explanation of the functions of a Design Centre. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. 13. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38465452. Its Aims and Uses. April 1956:3. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 14. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38665432. Look Before You Shop. Immediate. 1956:1. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 15. DCA 2/1.1945 (C45). At the opening address of the first COID meeting. 12 January 1944. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38465452. 16. In fact visitors were recorded to be: the trade buyer, the tourist, architects, supplies and purchasing officers, retailers, manufacturers and the general public. See DCA /Press Release no. IDG 38465452. Its Aims and Uses. April 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. The Mass Observation Archive, which specializes in recording everyday life in Britain, undertook a survey for the Design Centre between January and April 1957. ‘Men seemed less likely to choose household and kitchen utensils . . . more likely to choose fireplaces, boilers . . . radios, television sets, and record players.’ M-O: A Mass Observation Report ‘Design Centre’ Mass Observation Ltd. (1957:25). Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 17. DCA _DCM (56)7 Design Centre Committee Minutes. 15 February 1956:4–6 and DCA _C/574 Opening of the Design Centre. 2 February 1956. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38965462. Opening of the Design Centre. Immediate [n.d.] 1957. 2. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38965462. Prince Philip at the Design Centre. 10 May 1957:1. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. 18. DCA ID /10z(iii) ‘What is a Design Centre?’ 2. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. Design magazine began in 1949 and cost 30 shillings for twelve issues when the average wage was £100 per year (2,000 shillings); Design cost roughly two per cent of the average monthly earning. DCA /The Design Centre: A National Showroom leaflet, 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. Part of the Mass Observation Archive survey for the Design Centre (1957) recognized that ‘visitors were of a much higher social and economic status than would be expected if they were representative of the general public’. Fifty-four per cent of men visited and most of the visitors were C and AB , lower middle class and upper middle class respectively with the visitor age ranging from 25–44 years. ‘It is attracting the people most likely to be setting up homes and likely to have the financial means to purchase some of the things that attract them.’ 19. DCA /CM (45)3: 3 5(d) Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. Designer Audrey Levy commented that it was desirable to ‘architects, designers, interiors designers, that type of people bought the stuff ’. Personal interview. Devon. 16 July 2011. 20. Examples of exhibitions that might take place at the Centre were: case histories of product development and examples of successful design policies; examples of foreign design; furnishing schemes by leading interior

36

The Design Council’s Designs of the Year, 1957 designers. The Council were far from satisfied that enough firms were aware of the opportunities for publicity and promotion for their products. COID, Thirteenth Annual Report. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 21. The Design Index in 1951 was initially called the ‘stock list’ for which experts could assist the COID and approve the chosen goods. The Design Review was an initiative that Design magazine began by reviewing a few products in the magazine each month. This was the Council’s photographic and sample record of well-designed consumer goods in production. Manufacturers wishing to exhibit were urged to submit the products of which they were most proud to Design Review. Submissions were considered by a selection committee. The Review could also provide a basis for selection for exhibitions ‘with its systematic reference to many thousands of products’, in other parts of Britain and abroad. In fact during 1957 there was an expectation of some 700 requests for details of designers from manufacturers through the COID’s index. 22. Furniture, glassware, china or pottery were the items most people were particularly interested, according to 32 per cent of visitors (Mass Observation op. cit. 1957:17). 23. DCA /363_C/574 Design Centre Opening; the Design Centre. 1956: 6. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. 24. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38965462. Opening of the Design Centre. Immediate [n.d.] 1957:2. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. 25. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38765452. Buying Wisely in Britain. Immediate [n.d.] 1957:2. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. 26. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 38665432. Look Before You Shop 1. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 27. COID, Thirteenth Annual Report. ‘Not for generations have so many individuals been so interested in and wellinformed about good design, nor indeed have so many acceptable designs been produced.’ As part of the Mass Observation survey (1957), when asked why they chose a particular product, thirty-five per cent of the public said that ‘they liked the look of the item in question’. Twenty-one per cent said that ‘the articles were well designed’ and twenty-one per cent said that ‘the articles were practical useful items’. 28. The Design Centre proved popular and by the time of the exhibition, 735,000 people had visited and over 600 manufacturers had exhibited in the Centre. DCA /363/1645/5 Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. Letter to Mr Williams, Mr Gregson, Mr Medwin, Mr McGeoghehan, Mr Johnston from Mr Reilly. 13 December 1956. In fact, the anniversary exhibition was seen initially as ‘a more formal extension of the spotlighting we do through the window display’. 29. Paul Reilly suggested that the COID had warned, in Design magazine, as long ago as 1951, that ‘as contemporary design moves forward its path is beset with pitfalls in proportion to the speed of advance. Chief of these is the delusion that it is a fashion. . . . It would be a sad story if, just as the public is beginning to form a sound judgment on quality and design, we should be driven to distraction and reaction by the perky chatter of contemporary clichés’, Design (April, 1957). DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Medwin from Mr Benoy. 19 December 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. The final draft of the judges’ report for Designs of the Year was carefully worded; ‘in naming for special merit twelve products for the many hundreds of those carefully selected articles’. 30. The Royal Society for Arts first instigated RDI s in 1938 in order to encourage industrial design and improve the status of the designer. Four members were chosen as well as a Chairman, the fourth being an honorary member, non-British and a woman. Out of a total of twenty-five Council Committee Members, only three were women: Miss Mary Grieve, editor of Woman magazine; The Lady Sempill, artist and designer; and Mrs Alison Settle, journalist on The Observer. 31. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Williams, Mr Gregson, Mr Johnston, Mr McGeoghegan from Mr Medwin. 21 December 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 32. DCA /363/1645/5 Report on Progress Meeting for ‘Designs of the Year’. 15 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. The captions were as follows: CASSEROLES , Pyrex, 1049, 1067; approximate retail price; designed by; made by (with the manufacturer’s address), NOT manufactured by; judges’ comments.

37

Design Objects and the Museum 33. Astrid Sampe (1909–2002) was an Honorary RDI (the title given to non-British citizen) and a prolific and influential textile designer in Sweden. She studied at Stockholm School of Arts and the Royal College of Art, London and set up the textile studio for the NK department store. Milner Gray was a designer and member of Design Research Unit (DRU ). Professor R. Y. Goodden was Rector of the Royal College of Art (RCA ) and one of the architects (along with Richard Russell, Gordon Russell’s brother) of the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at The Festival of Britain. Brian O’Rorke was an architect and designer. 34. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Williams, Mr Gregson, Mr Johnston and Mr McGeoghegan from Mr Gardner Medwin. 21 December 1956. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 35. DCA /Press Release no. IDG 38965462. The Opening of the Design Centre. Speech by The Chairman, Mr W. J. Worboys, April 1956. 4. DCA /Press Release no. IDG 38465452. Its Aims and Uses, April 1956:5. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 36. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Williams, Mr Johnston, Mr Gregson and Mr McGeoghegan from Mr A. GardnerMedwin. 11–12 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 37. DCA /363/1645/5 Report on Progress Meeting for ‘Designs of the Year’. 15 April 1957:2. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. However, Mr Allan said he personally did want to give the designers a higher profile at the exhibition. 38. DCA /363/1645/5. Separate letters to all the designers from Mr Medwin. 29 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 39. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Sir Gordon Russell from J. Noel White. Points for the RDI meeting. 2 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. Textile, carpet, wallpaper, pottery, furniture, kitchen light equipment e.g. washing machine or cooker, cutlery, leather (suitcase), bathroom fittings, glassware (oven or table), radio or television and kitchen utensils. 40. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Astrid Sampe from J. Noel White, copied to Milner Gray. 12 April 1957. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. DCA /363/1645/5 COID ‘Designs of the Year: First Draft’. 11 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Sir Gordon Russell from A. Gardner-Medwin. 10 April 1957. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. These points were made about some of the twelve products chosen: 1. Casseroles Pyrex: the idea of showing three covered dishes is accepted but it would be preferred if the bowls were omitted; 2. Rotaflex Pendant Lamp Shade: a change of design had occurred and it was felt that only one size and one colour of shade should be shown; 3. Wallpaper Palladio: it was felt that the colour choice of grey and yellow should be used; 4. Imperial Axminster Carpeting: it was decided that the first choice should be shown; 5. Hille Settee-bed Convertible: it was felt a very neutral, plain covering for the settee be chosen; 6. Connoisseur table glass set: it was agreed that three table glasses were selected; 7. Strawberry Hill; says Ditto regarding pottery; 8. Pye Television: will the Pye television be shown on legs or as a table model. The other four products were not mentioned. 41. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Milner Gray from Astrid Sampe. 12 April 1957. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. In the month leading up to Designs of the Year, the magazine had an article titled ‘For a lifetime: Style and quality are still possible when you are setting up home’ (House and Garden, April 1957). 42. The COID was a promoter of Scandinavian design as a model of ‘good design’. Scandinavian products were imported before and after the war when imports escalated due to the lack of materials in Britain and because the ‘Utility’ scheme was still in place in the early 1950s. Shops such as Heal’s, Liberty and Dunn’s of Bromley also sold Scandinavian items. In his book, The Things We See: Furniture, Sir Gordon Russell included many 1947 Scandinavian pieces (1947). (See MacDonald and Porter 1990.) 43. Although Sampe had reservations about the Pride cutlery, Mellor was hugely influenced by Scandinavian design, having travelled to Scandinavia in 1952. Retrospectively, the success of Mellor’s cutlery challenges Sampe’s comments. The set is still being made over fifty years since it was designed and is the only selected product still in production. Conversation with Fiona MacCarthy, Mellor Museum, Sheffield, April 2011. The price of a set of Pride cutlery today is approximately £95 per six-piece setting in stainless steel. 44. DCA /363/1645/5 Report on Progress Meeting for ‘Designs of the Year’. 15 April 1957:3. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives.

38

The Design Council’s Designs of the Year, 1957 45. DCA /Press Release no. IDG 44975501. Prince Philip at the Design Centre, 10 May 1957:1. 46. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Milner Gray from Astrid Sampe. 25 April 1957:1. Sampe stated in her letter to Gray, correspondence she had received from Gordon Russell on 23 April, which stated, ‘thank you very much for the help you gave us over the Designs of the Year. It was most stimulating to us to have your comments, and I am proposing that your criticism should be used in an article in Design’. 47. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Astrid Sampe from Mr Milner Gray. 6 May 1957:1. 48. DCA /363/1645/5 Letter to Mr Milner Gray from Astrid Sampe. 25 April 1957:1. 49. The Guardian (1957) and The Sunday Times (Harling 1957) were the only newspapers to comment on Designs of the Year, 1957, in its entirety. 50. DCA /Press Release no. IDG 44975501. Prince Philip at the Design Centre. 10 May 1957:1. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. The Duke continued his speech, ‘this certificate is not just for the boardroom . . . I believe that it should go to everyone in your firms who had any part in the making of these goods . . . I would like to see the day when the climate of opinion is such that no self-respecting manufacturer or retailer would dream of stocking anything that has not been in the Design Centre; when it will be considered a lapse of manners if anything new is not shown here first’. To enable the public to identify Designs of the Year in shops, the Council produced show cards for each product and made them available for a modest charge to manufacturers and retailers. See COID, ‘This Year’s Work’ Thirteenth Annual Report 10–11. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 51. DCA / Press Release no. IDG 44775510. Designs of the Year. 10 May 1957:7. Design Council/ University of Brighton Design Archives. The comments were also published in Design. The twelve choices were described as having been ‘so patently based on good sense’. Editorial, ‘Comment: Without Fear or Favour’. Design 102, June 1957:19. Design Council/University of Brighton Design Archives. 52. DCA /363/1645/5 Paper to Mr Milner Gray from Astrid Sampe. 12 April 1957:2. Judge Sampe commenting on the Wedgwood dinner service, Queens Ware Summer Sky.

References Attfield, J. (1996) ‘Give ’Em Something Dark and Heavy: The Role of Design in the Material Culture of Popular British Furniture, 1939–1965’. Journal of Design History, 9(3), 185–201. Attfield, J. (2000) Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Attfield, J. (2007) Bringing Home Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Banham, M. and Hillier, B. (eds) (1976) A Tonic to the Nation: the Festival of Britain 1951. London: Thames and Hudson. Bennett, T. (1998) ‘Exhibitionary Complex’. New Formations, Spring, 4, 61. Buckley, C. (1986) ‘Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis/Women and Design’. Design Issues, 3(2), 3–14. Buckley, C. (2007) Designing Modern Britain. London: Reaktion Books. Carrington, N. (ed.) (1933) Design in the Home. London: Country Life. Farr, M. (1955) Design in British Industry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Guardian (1957) ‘Best of the Best in Design: Centre’s First Year’ by A Correspondent. 11 May 1957, p. 5. Harling, R. (1957) ‘Would You Have Chosen These?’ The Sunday Times, 12 May 1957, p. 20. House and Garden (1957) ‘Style and Quality’. April 1957 (pp. 58–59). Levy, Audrey. Interview with the author, 16 July 2011. Lewis, J. (1992) Women in Britain Since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell. MacCarthy, F. (1972) All Things Bright and Beautiful. London: Allen and Unwin. MacCarthy, Fiona. Interview with the author, April 2011. MacDonald, S. and Porter, J. (1990) Putting on the Style: Setting up Home in the 1950s. London: The Geffrye Museum. McGuirk, J. (2010) ‘On Design. Design Research Unit: The Firm that Branded Britain’. The Guardian, 12 October 2010. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct-12/design-research-unit-branding-britain (Accessed 15 June 2015).

39

Design Objects and the Museum Morley, C. (1990) ‘Homemakers and Design Advice’. In Putnam, T. and Newton, C. (eds), Household Choices. London: Futures Publications (pp. 89–97). Pearce, S. M. (1992) Museums, Objects and Collections. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Pevsner, N. (1937) An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read, H. (1967) Art and Industry. London: Faber and Faber. Reilly, P. (1956) ‘The Design Centre’. Design, 86, 109–110. Reilly, P. (1957) ‘A Stock-Taking After a Hundred Issues of Design’. Design, 100, 25. Russell, G. (1947) The Things We See: Furniture. London: Penguin. Russell, G. (1957) ‘Raising the Designer’s Status’. Design, 98, 47. Seddon, J. and Worden, S. (eds) (1994) Women Designing: Redefining Design in Britain between the Wars. Brighton: University of Brighton. The Times (1956) ‘Centre for Good Design: The Best of British Quality’. 27 April 1956, p. 12. Woodham, J. M. (1983) The Industrial Designer and the Public. London: Pembridge Press. Woodham, J. M. (1996) ‘Managing British Design Reform 1: Fresh Perspectives on the Early Years of the COID’. Journal of Design History, 9(1), 53–65. Woodham, J. M. (1997) Twentieth Century Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woodham, J. M. and Maguire, P. (eds) (1997) Design and Popular Politics in Postwar Britain: The Britain Can Make It Exhibition of 1946. London: Leicester University Press.

Archives Bill and Betty archive Whitechapel Art Gallery – WAG Cabinet papers National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk – CAB COID archive Design Archives, University of Brighton – DCA ; COID : M-O ‘Design Centre Report’ Lucienne and Robin Day archive; Design and Industries Association records; Heals and Sons Holdings plc Archive of Art and Design, London – AAD Mass Observation archive Shopping Survey and Commodities Surveys, Mass Observation archive, University of Sussex RDI/Ashley Havinden archive Scottish Gallery of Modern Art and Special Book Collection, Edinburgh – GMA Streetly Manufacturing & Co. Ltd archive The Local Studies Centre, Rochdale – Turner Brothers Tibor Reich archive Tibor Reich archive, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon – DR 543 Wall Paper Manufacturers archive Lancashire Record office, Preston – DDW /WPM Wedgwood archive Wedgwood Museum, Stoke-on-Trent – BR /FR

40

CHAPTER 4 DESIGNING FOR A NEW NIGERIA: HAYES TEXTILES LIMITED AND THE BRITISH MANUFACTURE OF GELE IN THE POSTCOLONIAL PERIOD Nicola Stylianou

On 31 March 2000 the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) accepted a donation of forty-eight gele and five design drawings from the trustees of the estate of Mr D. A. Butler. Gele are a popular form of headdress among Nigerian women. These gele had been made by Hayes Textiles Limited, a British manufacturing company that specialized in the production of gele specifically for the Nigerian market. The V&A was interested in the Hayes textiles as examples of British design. They had, however, also acquired an archive of an important part of twentieth-century Nigerian fashion as well as evidence of the complicated cultural relationship between Britain and Nigeria and of transnational processes at work. By studying the Hayes headties in the V&A Museum and the sample swatches held in the Hayes Archive at the London College of Fashion (LCF ) this chapter will explore the history of this fascinating company and consider the place of these design objects in a national museum of art and design.

Introducing the gele Gele is a Yoruba word and means headwrap or headtie. Originating in the Yoruba community, they are commonly worn in Nigeria and by Nigerian women in other parts of the world. The wearing of headties by Yoruban women dates to at least the nineteenth century but the present fashion for headties that are shiny, large, elaborately tied and stiff is a twentieth-century phenomenon. The stiffness is important; the gravitydefying shapes that have become popular could not be achieved with a soft cloth. Hayes Textiles Limited was instrumental in the development of the fashion for big, stiff headties. Eve de Negri, who lived in Nigeria during the 1960s and was involved in the founding of the fashion department at Yaba College of Technology in Lagos, described how, at the time, the gele was evolving into something larger, more individual and more complex. Sometimes the gele, head-tie, is worn by them [countrywomen], but often the head is uncovered when working or sitting around in their compound. It is considered bad-form for a Yoruba woman to walk on the street without her head covered . . . The privilege of covering the head with a cloth when outdoors was extended to all married women in the 19th century. Before this time only brides were allowed a covering for the head. Dr. O. Johnson writing in the early twenties tells us that gele, or head-tie, was a band about 6–10 inches wide and about five feet long wound twice around the head and tucked in on one side. Nowadays it may be as long as one wishes, and as wide. Usually it is about two yards or so in length and about one yard in width. No longer the simple tucking-in on the side! Styles are innumerable (de Negri 1962).

41

Design Objects and the Museum

Hayes headties were produced and sold in the two-yard by one-yard size described by de Negri as this amount of cloth was necessary to create the elaborate shapes. Tying the headscarf is something of an art form and the tying can be done by a professional, a skilled friend, family member or the wearer herself. In 1975 Funke Familoni wrote a book describing the styles that were popular at that time and gave instructions about how to tie the gele. She described how the styles of tying changed and how the different styles were named, and how patterns on the Hayes gele sometimes reflected contemporary events: The styles and names of the styles have become very trendy. Some of the early names were ‘Cleopatra’, ‘V.C.10’ and ‘Mercedes Benz’. With independence in 1960 Nigerian themes became more apparent, an example being the headtie called ‘One Nigeria’. In the period of the civil war, headties and their names again reflected the times. . . . In 1972 Nigeria switched its driving to the right hand side of the road, and this was followed by a headtie called ‘Drive Right’ (Familoni 1975:4). Initially gele had been made out of locally produced cloths such as Aso-Oke, a narrow strip cloth handwoven in Nigeria. But, as Familoni explains, that changed: With the advent of the British Administration and the importation of foreign textiles like cotton, damask, wool, and velvet, the use of any type of traditionally woven cloth became less common in the sophisticated urban areas. The imported cloth was brightly coloured and provided a variety of different textures and sheens; it was therefore widely desired and highly regarded. . . . As time went on more and more imported material became available, its use spread throughout the culture. Today headties can be seen made of just about any kind, color, or type of material known to man (Familoni 1975:5). Helen Jennings provides a definition of gele in the glossary of her book New African Fashion (2011); she defines it as ‘an elaborate Yoruban headtie, usually made from aso-oke, damask, brocade or hayes’. Jennings lists ‘hayes’ as if it is a type of textile like damask or brocade rather than a brand name. This shows the extent to which this company has become synonymous with the development of the fashion for these headties. In the twenty-first century the gele has become something of an international phenomenon and women wearing them and shops providing them can be found in many European and American cities. Gele tutorials and guidance of the kind provided by Familoni’s book have now moved online, and typing ‘gele tying tutorial’ into YouTube brings a myriad of results guiding you through the process. The re-publication of de Negri’s work (quoted above) in the ‘Food for Thought’ section of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos Newsletter (2011) suggests that this is a topic of interest to a young urban readership. In addition, there is increasing interest from non-Nigerian audiences with exhibitions devoted to the gele held at both LCF in London (2005) and at the University of North Texas (2012).

Introducing Hayes Textiles Limited Nigeria had been part of the British Empire since 1900 but the trade relationship between Britain and Nigeria went back much further and led directly to Nigeria being declared a protectorate. The port city of Lagos had been under British control since 1861 and by the mid-1880s Britain had a ‘virtual trading monopoly’ over the Niger Delta through the National Africa Company (Reid 2009:156). It was in order to protect these trading rights that led to the British government chartering the Royal Niger Company in 1896 and four years later 42

Designing Textiles for a New Nigeria

taking formal control of the region. By the 1930s West Africa was an extremely important market for British textile manufacturers who had a seventy per cent share of the market (Launert 2002:160). It is in this period that Hayes Textiles, initially known as Hayes, Green and Bryden, was established. It is not clear who Green and Bryden were but Bill Hayes had been working in Nigeria since before the First World War. At this time Hayes imported a variety of textiles into Nigeria including headties. Ian McCall in his account of working in Nigeria mentions meeting Hayes in the 1950s: I met someone who would give me further insights into the workings of the local markets as far as imports were concerned. Bill Hayes owned a company called Hayes, Green and Bryden. . . . Bigger firms Bill could not compete with unless he knew something more about the market than they did, such were the economies of scale they could create. . . . Once a year he would make the journey to London and go on to Manchester to view the latest textile designs and feed the designers with ideas from his own experience (McCall 2003:21). The insight into the local market and the constant search for new designs that McCall attributes to Hayes were crucial to the ongoing success of the company under Derek Butler, donor of the V&A materials. It was around this time in the 1950s that Butler began working in the West African textile trade; he would later take over Hayes Textiles and it is the company under his leadership that is the focus of this chapter. Malcolm Sibson worked with Butler in the 1980s and 1990s, acting as company secretary for Hayes Textiles during the 1990s. According to Sibson, Butler was trained at the Royal Technical College, Salford in Manchester before travelling to Nigeria. Initially he worked in the textile department of Manchester-based cotton importer G. B. Ollivant, which was part of the United Africa Company (UAC ) from 1933. The UAC was the successor to the Royal Niger Company from 1929 and came under the control of Unilever during the early 1930s. At some point Butler began working with Bill Hayes, and when Hayes retired he took over the company and the Hayes Fierz brand of woven gele. This was a high-end brand and the finished product was expensive. A mail order catalogue reveals that in the late 1980s and early 1990s a Hayes Fierz headtie that measured 36 × 72 inches cost £47. The company also had cheaper ranges such as the Jubilee headtie, which was woven in Germany and finished in Switzerland and cost £32, and a printed version made in Japan called Super Jubilee, which cost only £20. Hayes Fierz headties were woven and finished in a factory in St. Gallen, Switzerland, an important centre for textile production since the eighteenth century. The logo of the Hayes Fierz brand is a silk moth. When the headties were first accessioned into the V&A they were listed as silk but subsequent testing has proved that they are synthetic. The headties were made of rayon, polyester and lurex and coated with a polyurethane or a nitro-cellulose finish. The stiff finish on the textiles was extremely important. Sibson explains the process: It’s a coating process . . . coated on the back. The cloth goes through this big machine and there’s a big blade. And at the edge of the blade there’s this big mess of polyurethane and as the cloth goes through the knife just coats it with a thin layer and the polyurethane then sets with that stiffness that’s required. The important thing was it shouldn’t wash out. Because if you put starch on it it would wash out straight away. Obviously if someone’s going to wash their headtie they don’t want it to be back to loom state after being washed (Sibson 2013). Sibson pointed to the unique innovation of the coating as an important factor in the success of Hayes Textiles: I think Bill Hayes and Mr. Butler must have developed the Hayes headtie to be this stiff article and everyone therefore copies. There was definitely a high quality, a number of threads per inch and all that 43

Design Objects and the Museum

sort of thing. Although we don’t know the threads per inch you actually intrinsically feel it. The fact that the finish was washable was very important because the imitations that were coming from Japan in the 80s, 70s and 80s. Washed them once and they just collapsed (Sibson 2013). In 1970 Butler left Nigeria and registered a company in the UK called Twilldene Textiles, which designed, produced and sold Hayes headties. In 1987 he changed the company name to Hayes Textiles Limited in line with the actual brand name on the cloths. In 1970 the Nigerian government introduced its Second National Development Plan, which ran until 1974. The plan included an indigenization strategy that stipulated small businesses could only be operated by Nigerians while larger companies required 40 per cent equity participation by Nigerians through shares (Falola 1999:139–140). Hayes Textiles was very profitable during the 1970s as Nigerians benefited from the oil boom. Toyin Falola has characterized this postcolonial period of Nigerian history as a time of ‘conspicuous consumption’ with the Nigerian government and the populace spending newfound wealth. The dazzlingly large and bright Hayes headties were the perfect accessory to express this. The company continued to succeed despite a ban on imported luxury goods, introduced in the late 1970s in an effort to promote local manufacturing. Nigerian customers, usually women, would travel to the UK and visit the Hayes showroom in West London. They would make their selections and return to Nigeria sometimes with headties in their luggage, sometimes sending them by airfreight. In this way the British company was not involved in getting the textiles into Nigeria, which would have been deemed illegal (Sibson 2013). The company reflected these complex transnational changes in manufacturing, and consumption and production was moved out of Europe in 1991 following the closure of the factory in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Butler bought up the factory’s Dornier looms and transported them to India in partnership with a company called Fidelity Textiles Limited. The looms were set up in Salem, Tamil Nadu and the headties were woven in India and then sent to Japan or Switzerland for finishing. Butler died in 1998 and the company closed. As we have seen, some of the headties were accessioned by the V&A, and a large number of textile samples, together with some additional materials relating to the company were archived at the LCF. Remaining stock and the trademark were sold to Flamingo Textiles, a London-based dealer in textiles for the West African market. It appears from British records that Flamingo Textiles still owns the trademark.

Hayes in the V&A In some ways the Hayes headties seem an unusual acquisition for the V&A, which is not known as a home for examples of African dress or fashion and has at certain times during its history explicitly excluded African objects. As recently as 2009 the V&A Collections Management Policy defined the geographical boundaries of the collection thus: ‘Objects are collected from all major artistic traditions of Europe and Asia . . . The Museum does not collect historic material from Africa South of the Sahara’ (V&A 2010 Appendix 1). However, these textiles were not acquired to represent Nigerian fashion but as examples of British design. Forming a museum collection is an active process of taxonomy and collecting and, by definition, involves selection and the imposition of a form of order onto objects. In order for an object to be collected or rejected by a museum, objects have to be classified so the institution can know whether or not a particular object deserves to be in the collection and its correct place within it (Elsner and Cardinal 1994:1). These decisions are made at the V&A during the acquisition process and recorded in the object’s documentation. The acquisition of the Hayes headties for the V&A collection was overseen by Jennifer Wearden, a curator in the Textiles Department. In the official paperwork required for acquisition and recorded in the V&A Archive, Wearden described the Hayes headties: ‘Almost all these are jacquard-woven silk [sic] from 44

Designing Textiles for a New Nigeria

Switzerland and are of the highest quality. They were produced for Hayes Textiles Limited who sold them in Nigeria; they were the market leaders until Mr Butler’s recent death. Their silk moth trademark has been sold to another company’ (VAA : RF /2000/298). She went on to justify their acquisition: ‘This small collection of woven textiles from Nigeria will complement our existing group of printed cottons for export to West Africa’ (VAA : RF /2000/298). The printed cottons Wearden is referring to are so-called wax prints that from the late-nineteenth century onward were designed and produced in Europe for the West African market. The V&A began to collect British manufactured examples of these cloths in the 1940s, as the trade in these textiles with West Africa began to decline (Stylianou 2012a:66; 2012b:264–266). The majority of these textiles were acquired by the Circulation Department as examples of contemporary British design and manufacture to be used for educational displays at art colleges across the country (Stylianou 2012b:262). The educational function of the Circulation Department harked back to the V&A’s founding principles when the museum hoped to improve the quality of British design and manufacture by providing good examples to act as creative inspiration to contemporary designers and makers. By referring back to these earlier acquisitions, Wearden is placing these textiles firmly in the context of British design, as these headties would not have been acquired if they had been made by a Nigerian company rather than a British one. The Museum’s interest in them is further bolstered by the presence of similar objects already in the collection. However, the objects themselves can be used to tell a different story that reflects the history of Nigeria and its ongoing engagement with Britain in the postcolonial period. The headties have not been displayed in the V&A (although an example of a gele was included in Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones in 2009) but one (V&A: T.117–2000) is included in the textile study racks on display at the V&A’s Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and the rest of the collection may be accessed by appointment.

Hayes Designs Sibson confirmed that in the 1980s and 1990s all the designs and choice of colourways were by Butler himself. When asked why Hayes Textiles were able to maintain their position as market leaders Sibson pointed to a number of factors (including the fabric’s stiff coating discussed above) but emphasized the importance of fashionable design: ‘I think Mr. Butler was very much creating new designs all the time whereas everyone else would just imitate . . . A lot of those guys down in London . . . they would just copy designs. They weren’t originating new ones and I think that’s probably why Mr Butler led the way’ (Sibson 2013). The textiles in the V&A and the Hayes Archive at the LCF also reveal something about Butler’s design process. The designs are eclectic, drawing on sources from all around the world and sometimes lifting images from books, magazines and postcards and reproducing them on textiles. A clear example of this process can be found in the V&A collection. One of the examples acquired shows a repeating fairy-tale castle in black, mauve and silver on a blue background (V&A T.129:1–2000). Accessioned with this headtie was a design drawing for it together with what appears to be an image torn from a magazine from which the design is taken (V&A T.129:2–2000). Other examples of this from the Hayes Archive include aeroplanes taken directly from Swiss Air postcards and Japanese imagery taken from books (Hayes Archive). The textile swatches in the Hayes Archive at the LCF and in the V&A collection reveal an amazing array of designs. In order to start developing a typology of these textiles it is worth starting with the classification systems that have been used for ‘wax prints’ for West Africa, as they are also textiles produced by European companies for a West African market. Ruth Nielsen identified eight categories of pattern used on these wax 45

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 4.1 Sample for a gele, Hayes Textiles Limited, jacquard woven rayon, T.129:1–2000, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

prints. She lists these as Indian cottons, Javanese batiks, European prints, African indigenous cloth, traditional African objects and symbols, historical/current events or people, natural forms and geometrical designs (Nielsen 1979:482–484). The influence of Indian cottons can still be seen in the use of many boteh or paisley patterns on designs in the Hayes Archive and the V&A (V&A: T.91–2000). However, by the time these textiles were made this pattern could be considered as much a British paisley as it was an Indian boteh. Designs influenced by Javanese batiks cannot be found in the Hayes textiles; this is perhaps because it would be difficult to replicate the effect of batik on woven fabrics such as these. European prints, taken to mean classic European textile patterns, are also absent. However, what might be termed stereotypical European and British imagery was used on the cloths. An example in the V&A depicts a ‘Nordic scene’; it has a red background with a repeating pattern of hills 46

Designing Textiles for a New Nigeria

Figure 4.2 Sample swatch for a gele showing the ‘Bearskin pattern’, Hayes Textiles Limited, jacquard woven rayon, T.124–2000, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. covered in fir trees in gold (V&A: T.101–2000). Another example from the V&A collection depicts the head and shoulders of a British Guardsman in his distinctive bearskin cap, holding a bayonet, on a yellow background. Other British patterns include a Tudor Rose (V&A: T.113–2000), Big Ben, the London Underground logo and HM Queen Elizabeth II (Hayes Archive). These stereotypically British images are interesting in the context of postcolonial Nigeria and the use of the British Queen shows an ongoing relationship with the Commonwealth. However, it is not only British or even European stereotypes that are featured as images were sourced from across the world, for example, the Statue of Liberty (Hayes Archive: 75089) and a Chinese pagoda (V&A: T.116–2000). Japanese-inspired designs also feature heavily, for example the cherry tree pattern on one of the samples in the V&A (V&A: T.121–2000). The influence of Japanese art can also be seen on examples at the LCF Archive, which includes material used to create designs for headties and three books about Japanese art with some of the images carefully cut out. 47

Design Objects and the Museum

Indigenous cloth is one of Nielsen’s categories, and there are many patterns in the Hayes Archive based on strip weaving. One of the examples in the V&A has clearly been designed to imitate narrow strip weaving from West Africa with its geometric patterns arranged in stripes (V&A: T.117–2000). The sample includes the same design in three different colourways. There are also designs based on popular wax prints (Hayes Archive 70021, 70022, 75101). Although these patterns could not be termed indigenous they have certainly come to be ‘traditional’. African objects and symbols also feature to some degree on the Hayes headties (Hayes Archive 15134, 15290). The historical or current events category is represented by the portrait of HM Queen Elizabeth II , mentioned above, and the Nigerian flag (Hayes Archive 65041/5). One of the designs also features the symbol for Naira, the Nigerian currency that replaced the British pound in 1973. Incidentally Familoni also described a style of tying that commemorated this event (Familoni 1975:15). Nielsen’s final two categories of natural forms and geometric patterns also feature in the Hayes headties. In fact these form the largest group of textiles, as floral patterns are particularly common. Nielsen’s typology for wax prints cannot be straightforwardly applied to these textiles but it has given some useful pointers. Natural forms and geometrical designs figure but are too broad to be useful categories; imitations of African cloth exist (and wax print designs themselves should be included in this even though not strictly indigenous), African objects also appear and historical or current events and people also feature. However, while the boteh pattern from Indian cotton continues to appear there are no clear links to either

Figure 4.3 Sample swatch for a gele designed to imitate West African narrow strip weaving, Hayes Textiles Limited, jacquard woven rayon, T.117–2000, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 48

Designing Textiles for a New Nigeria

Javanese batiks or European textiles. What we see instead are images and influences being drawn from a much wider range of places, such as the USA , Japan and China, reflecting the increasingly globalized influences in the second half of the twentieth century. Two important categories of Hayes Textiles designs cannot be covered by Nielsen’s typology: one is the use of logos of major international companies such as Mercedes Benz and American Express, which were reproduced on Hayes designs with an apparent disregard for copyright (Hayes Archive 15292, 12194); and a final group of textiles featuring aeroplanes, trains and space rockets, which represent technology (Hayes Archive 12254, 12271,12272, 15320). Together with the company logos and the international landmarks these suggest modernity and allude to wealth and progress. Adeline Masquelier has written that ‘Dress has long been a vehicle through which people in the periphery constitute themselves as modern cosmopolitans’ (Masquelier 2013:140). I would argue that these designs express a modern cosmopolitanism suggesting as they do travel, wealth and an engagement with the wider world. This in itself reflects a time of optimism and confidence in an independent Nigeria as oil generated not only wealth for some, but a position for Nigeria on the world stage.

Conclusion Hayes Textiles was instrumental in the development of the fashion for gele among Nigerian woman. Its success was based on direct market knowledge, ability to stiffen its fabrics and constant development of new designs that appealed to a fashion conscious Nigerian audience. While there is an irony to an iconic Nigerian fashion being built on designs from a British company, particularly during a period of import restrictions, it is important to remember the agency of the customers to accept or reject goods offered to them. The textiles were acquired by the V&A as an example of British design, but together with the Hayes Archive at the LCF these samples form an interesting source for exploring the complex development of postcolonial Nigerian fashion during the late-twentieth century.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Lesley Miller and Clare Browne at the V&A and Jane Holt at LCF for providing access to the Hayes Textiles. I would also like to thank TrAIN Research Centre for providing funding that allowed me to present an earlier version of this research at the Design History Society Conference in India, 2013. Above all I would like to thank Malcolm Sibson for his generosity in sharing his time and his knowledge. This chapter would not have been possible without the insights and information that he provided.

References De Negri, E. (1962) ‘Yoruba Women’s Costume’. Nigeria, 72, 10–12. Elsner, R. and Cardinal, R. (1994) The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Falola, T. (1999) The History of Nigeria. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Familoni, F. (1975) Gele: The Yoruba Headtie. Calgary: Times Press Limited. ‘Food for Thought’ (2011) Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos; Newsletter issue no. 13, September–December 2011. Jennings, H. (2011) New African Fashion. Munich: Prestel. Launert, F. (2002) ‘The Role of Design in the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1900–1939’. Unpublished PhD thesis.

49

Design Objects and the Museum Masquelier, A. (2013) ‘Forging Connections, Performing Distinctions: Youth, Dress, and Consumption in Niger’. In Tranberg Hansen, K. and Soyini Madison, D. (eds), African Dress: Fashion, Agency and Performance. London: Bloomsbury (pp. 138–152). McCall, I. (2003) Nigeria, a Personal History. Available online: http://www.ianmccall.co.uk/warri.htm (Accessed 9 July 2014). Nielsen, R. (1979) ‘Wax Printed Textiles’. In Cordwell, J. M. and Schwarz, R. A. (eds), The Fabric of Culture. The Hague: Mouton (pp. 467–497). Reid, R. J. (2009) History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sibson, Malcolm (2013) Interviewed by author, 1 August 2013. Stylianou, N. (2012a) ‘Export Textiles in West Africa’. In Breward, C. and Wood, G. (eds), British Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age. London: V&A Publishing (pp. 64–67). Stylianou, N. (2012b) ‘Producing and Collecting for Empire: African Textiles in the V&A 1852-2000’. Unpublished PhD Thesis. VAA : RF /2000/298 Victoria and Albert Museum Archive Nominal File Hayes. V&A (2010) V&A Collections and Development Policy 2010, Appendix 1.0 Acquisition and Disposal Policy. Extract from the V&A Collections Management Policy 2009. Available online: http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/documents/ about-us/2010/v&a-collections-development-policy.pdf (Accessed 4 August 2014).

Website http://www.thederekbutlertrust.org.uk

50

CHAPTER 5 TOWARDS AN UNCENSORED HISTORY OF DESIGN: IDEAL HOMES AND CONSTANCE SPRY AT THE DESIGN MUSEUM, LONDON Deborah Sugg Ryan

Introduction In 1993 Ideal Homes, a survey of the history of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition from its founding in 1908 to 1993, opened at the Design Museum, London. As guest curator of Ideal Homes, I wanted the exhibition to challenge the established approaches to design history taken by museums of design and decorative arts. In particular, influenced by feminist design histories, anthropology and ethnography, I aimed to move away from reading objects through aesthetic, primarily modernist, considerations of form and function to consider instead objects as bearers of social relations. I tried to subvert the ‘white cube’ of the museum and capture some of the carnivalesque pleasures of the Ideal Home Exhibition in the presentation and design of Ideal Homes at the Design Museum. In this chapter I reflect on the curatorial process of Ideal Homes and the conflicts that it created within the Design Museum. I focus particularly on critical issues raised around ‘good design’, class, gender and the domestic interior in relation to both Ideal Homes and the Ideal Home Exhibition proper. I argue that those issues were intrinsically bound up with ‘modernist’ curatorial practices. I also discuss the ways in which these issues were raised again by the Design Museum’s controversial 2004 exhibition Constance Spry: A Millionaire for a Few Pence, which led to the resignation of the Museum’s chairman, the British inventor and industrial designer James Dyson.

Ideal Homes In 1992 I was invited to pitch a proposal for an exhibition at London’s Design Museum. Having previously worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), I had just started lecturing at the University of Wolverhampton and I was also working on my PhD on the history of the Ideal Home Exhibition. Terence Conran, guru of ‘good design’ and purveyor of ‘good taste’ to the masses via his Habitat chain, founded the Design Museum in 1989, with Stephen Bayley, who had run the Boilerhouse design galleries at the V&A, as its first Director. The Museum – then and now – displays twentieth-century mass-produced design in a 1950s’ warehouse by the River Thames remodelled in the International Style of the 1930s. At the time of writing, the Design Museum is preparing to move to the former premises of the Royal Commonwealth Institute on London’s Kensington High Street. From its inception until 1992, the Design Museum exhibited objects on white pedestals, accompanied by captions emphasizing technology and aesthetics. Such curatorial practices reflected the dominance of modernist thinking in art and design history, established by Alfred H. Barr Jr. at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) in New York during his tenure in the 1930s. In 1959, for example, MoMA elevated a humble 51

Design Objects and the Museum

Tupperware container to the status of a modernist icon by putting it on a pedestal and emphasizing the simplicity of its form. The fact that the chosen piece was white rather than pastel pink helped divorce it from its social functions and meanings. In the early 1990s the emphasis in the academic disciplines of social, economic and design history, cultural studies and social anthropology had begun to shift from production to consumption. For example, Amanda Vickery (1993) questioned the dominance of ‘trickle-down’ theory among historians of consumption, arguing that this approach assumes envy as a natural, motivating force and then uses this assumption to denigrate women. At the same time, academics working in cultural studies such as Meaghan Morris (1998) examined the ways in which consumers subvert given meanings and make their own. As I noted in an article reflecting on my curatorial processes in Journal of Museum Education (Sugg 1993), British curators at this point made few attempts to capture the new academic concerns of design history, with its focus on consumerism. As Peter Jenkinson (1992) (co-curator of the influential Walsall Art Gallery People’s Show in 1990) argued, they tended to collect objects for their own sake, ignoring their content and social significance. Many social history museums, for example, exhibited electrical appliances that were usually donated rather than actively collected. Museums’ presentation of the objects often gave a false impression of their availability, affordability and use. All too often objects’ functionalism was examined, yet their symbolism as markers of social status was ignored. In contrast, the Ideal Home Exhibition displayed the lower-middle-class social aspirations and tastes that museums have largely overlooked. The Exhibition told a different history of the domestic interior from that shown in the tasteful galleries of museums of decorative arts, such as the V&A, or in social history museums. The Ideal Home Exhibition presented a design history that largely rejected Arts and Crafts and the Modern Movement in architecture and design but still engaged with modernity. The Ideal Home Exhibition addressed women explicitly as consumers, while museums often assume a neutral but implicitly male viewer.

The Ideal Home Exhibition The annual Ideal Home Exhibition (Ryan 1997), founded in London in 1908 by the British middle market Daily Mail newspaper, is the longest continuously running commercial exhibition open to the public in the world.1 Through a unique combination of the educational, the entertaining and the commercial, the Ideal Home Exhibition promotes the idea of a modern lifestyle, signified by the possession of the most up-to-date appliances and ownership of a brand-new home. The Exhibition influences and reflects public taste in all matters that make a house a home. From 1913 the Ideal Home Exhibition settled into a format that brought together a range of retailers and manufacturers, which remains little changed today. The organizational categories comprise: Labour-Saving; Furnishings, Construction and Decoration; Heating and Lighting; Music and Recreation; The Garden; Food and Cookery. The growth in numbers of appliance-owning and home-owning suburbanites – rather than cutting-edge developments in architecture and design – can be traced through the Ideal Home Exhibition. Modernism crept into the interior of the ideal home through the back door via the kitchen, in the form of new technology, often aimed at and used by women. Public and private spaces are confused and reversed in the Ideal Home Exhibition. For example, visitors wander in old English gardens, complete with fully grown trees, which are sheltered from the unpredictability of the English climate. Turfed lawns laid on the concrete floors of London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre merge effortlessly into painted backdrops of country cottages and misty horizons. Visitors queue patiently to gain admittance to houses that are not private at all: every fixture and fitting is sponsored by a manufacturer. Dividing walls are knocked through, enabling an obstructed 52

Ideal Homes and Constance Spry at the Design Museum, London

view – legitimized voyeurism – from behind a rope barrier, of a dining room table with sparkling cutlery glued to its surface. A visit to the Ideal Home Exhibition is a collective and celebratory experience of popular modernity, and a chance to participate in a shared material culture. The experience is perhaps nearer to a theme park than a museum. The first exhibition in 1908 attracted 160,000 visitors. At its peak in 1956, the Ideal Home Exhibition attracted 1.4 million visitors, representing a popular appeal far surpassing any British museum. In 1992 the Exhibition attracted approximately 500,000 visitors in its three-week duration (an enormous amount in comparison with the Design Museum’s annual figure at the time of 120,000). Despite its popularity, for many critics the Ideal Home Exhibition provoked – and continues to provoke – anxieties about consumerism, social aspirations and ‘bad taste’. The exhibition proposal Previous research on the Ideal Home Exhibition by design historians tended to treat it as a source of information on products and designers, overlooking its role as a social space and a leisure activity and ignoring its appeal to its audience. One of the options I could have proposed for the Design Museum exhibition was a sanitized history of the Ideal Home Exhibition, editing out examples of ‘bad taste’ and the excesses of nostalgia in favour of recognized design styles such as Arts and Crafts, named designers (such as Alison and Peter Smithson whose ‘House of the Future’ was shown in the 1956 Exhibition) and upmarket manufacturers and retailers such as Heal’s. Or I could have shown aberrations of taste in order to condemn them and instruct the public in ‘good design’. Instead, I decided to challenge the established museum approach to exhibiting and interpreting design history. I was influenced by British feminist design historians (Attfield and Kirkham 1989) who examined women as users of design and considered the ways in which they act as non-professional designers, investing objects with new personalized meanings and, in turn, using them to form their own identities. This move away from modernist aesthetic considerations is particularly relevant to the display of domestic appliances. As Gaby Porter (1988) pointed out, museums have often neglected to confront the fact of housework as women’s work, substituting the messages of manufacturers and advertisers for historical study and thus divorcing housework from both particular and broader social and economic contexts. I wanted to deconstruct these gendered messages in the Ideal Homes exhibition. I was also influenced by the turn to material culture by British design historians, who drew particularly on the work of social anthropologist Daniel Miller (1987) and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1993). This approach allowed objects to be discussed as bearers of social relations. I was surprised when my proposal for an exhibition that concentrated on design as social history rather than aesthetics was accepted by the Design Museum. Ideal Homes aimed to explore modernity as a condition and modernism as material culture, investigating class mobility and social change by concentrating primarily on the periods between the world wars and immediately following the Second World War. I hoped that an exploration of the interwar period would show that many of the characteristics of consumption that are thought to date from the 1950s in fact occurred much earlier. I wanted to devise an exhibition that highlighted the act of display, rejecting modernist assumptions about neutrality, thus allowing objects to have multiple meanings. And I was determined to attract the Ideal Home Exhibition’s audience to the Design Museum and convey academic concepts in an accessible and meaningful way. Initially, the Design Museum approached Angex, the subsidiary of the Daily Mail that then owned the Ideal Home Exhibition, for sponsorship. They declined, and were actually quite wary of my research. They seemed reluctant to look back lest the exhibition’s past showed up its future, which seemed very uncertain at that point. A relatively modest budget was eventually obtained through sponsorship from the Alliance and Leicester Building Society. 53

Design Objects and the Museum

Ideal Homes consisted of archival photographs and newsreels, Daily Mail and Ideal Home Exhibition publications and press photographs, as well as postcards, domestic appliances, reconstructed room sets and manufacturers’ and retailers’ displays, and miscellaneous objects. Working with the exhibition designers, our aim was to try to capture some of the carnivalesque atmosphere and chaos of the Ideal Home Exhibition in the design of the Design Museum exhibition, and to disrupt the cool white modernist space of the Museum. Our small budget meant that existing white museum display cases and easels had to be used, so we repainted them in bright colours. A thematic rather than a linear approach allowed the Ideal Home Exhibition to be seen in its full cultural context. When possible, the Daily Mail captions or quotations from the original exhibition catalogues and press photos were used as exhibition captions, becoming exhibits in themselves. An extended caption introduced each section of the exhibition to flesh out its historical context. The section called ‘The Social’ looked at the ways in which the Ideal Home Exhibition addressed social housing: first by exhibiting model houses, later as spectacle. ‘Forecasts of the Future’ explored the ways in which the exhibition predicted life in the future. ‘Tudorbethan’ examined how the past was re-invented in the homes and gardens of the exhibition and in the expansion of suburbia in the interwar years. ‘The House That Women Want’ considered women’s participation in the exhibition through competitions for ‘ideal homes’. ‘Labour-Saving’ investigated debates around the effectiveness of domestic appliances set against the professionalization of housework and the declining numbers of servants. One of the most popular features of the Ideal Home Exhibition has always been the demonstration of the latest labour-saving gadgets. Both small and large appliances were marketed as electric servants, as if

Figure 5.1 View of Ideal Homes, Design Museum, 1993. Photograph: Deborah Sugg Ryan. 54

Ideal Homes and Constance Spry at the Design Museum, London

Figure 5.2 ‘The back of the kitchen drawer’, Ideal Homes, Design Museum, 1993. Photograph: Deborah Sugg Ryan.

they were to revolutionize the kitchen by replacing labour. But once they were taken home, appliances were often used once, and then consigned to the back of the kitchen drawer. Feminists such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1989) have shown how appliances often enable tasks to be performed to higher standards, particularly those concerned with hygiene, and thus create more work than they actually save. These debates were explored in two cases titled ‘The Back of the Kitchen Drawer’. The cases were filled with objects purchased at the Ideal Home Exhibition over the years and lent by members of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI ). Founded in 1915 for women in rural communities to make contact with each other, Women’s Institutes (WI ) have long been interested in issues around housing and frequently participated in the Ideal Home Exhibition (Andrews 1997; Robinson 2012). I appealed to WI members to lend me objects in an article in their magazine Home and Country. The objects they offered tended to be ephemeral and cheap and were not the tasteful classics and examples of ‘good design’ more usually found in design museums. For example, the exhibit included a special plastic mould to make coconut pyramids. The objects from the ‘back of the kitchen drawer’ were shown in Ideal Homes with captions of their owners’ testimonies to their usefulness or otherwise. The following statement from the owner of a Bamix hand blender formed one such caption: When in 1965, my husband and I were married we spent our honeymoon in London and the Exhibition was one of our ports of call. . . . We were beguiled by the demonstrator of a food mixer (reputed to be able to do all that a larger mixer could do – needless to say that was not quite the case) and invested our

55

Design Objects and the Museum

wedding present [£10 collected by her husband’s colleagues] in what has proved to be an invaluable piece of kitchen equipment, which only about eight weeks ago gave up the ghost. Such testimonies revealed popular and contradictory definitions of the ‘modern’. This part of the exhibition challenged the modernist emphasis of design history on form and function; it allowed for a discussion of the ways in which consumers invest objects with meanings and memories that contribute in turn to their own personal identities. These objects were as much bearers of social relations as functional things. An important aspect of the Design Museum exhibition was the reconstruction of a room from the Women’s Institute House designed with the participation of the NFWI for the 1951 Ideal Home Exhibition. This house was based on a series of surveys of WI members and furnished and decorated with a mixture of wartime ‘Utility’2 and second-hand furniture given a new lease of life with paint, reupholstery and WI crafts. All too often the rooms recreated by museums give idealized pictures of the past, with all the furniture from a single decade, but fail to visualize rooms’ inhabitants or how they might have engaged with the space and its objects. For example, the Geffrye Museum’s 1935 living room (in 2014) is more like an illustration in a trade catalogue or a set from the television detective series Agatha Christie’s Poirot (LWT and ITV Studios, 1989–2013), seen through the subsequent lens of the invented term ‘Art Deco’, than a lived reality. The WI house introduced a type of realism and idealism that has rarely been seen in the Ideal Home Exhibition or in design museums.

Figure 5.3 Reconstruction of the parlour of the 1951 Women’s Institute House, Ideal Homes, Design Museum, 1993. Photograph: Deborah Sugg Ryan.

56

Ideal Homes and Constance Spry at the Design Museum, London

Ideal Homes was timed to coincide with the seventy-fifth Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition and drew the highest visitor numbers to the museum at that date, many of whom were Ideal Home Exhibition regulars but new to the Design Museum. It also received more media coverage than any previous exhibition at the Design Museum and was generally well received although some journalists used it as an opportunity to knock the Ideal Home Exhibition proper. Terence Conran of the Conran Foundation (the educational charity that founded the Design Museum), however, was not impressed. At the exhibition’s private view Conran took me aside to tell me that the exhibition had no place in ‘his’ museum because it was not about ‘good design’. Constance Spry: A Millionaire for a Few Pence In 2004 I contacted the Design Museum’s Director, journalist Alice Rawsthorn, to ask if she might be interested in an exhibition on Constance Spry, in whom I had a long-term interest, having written an entry on her for the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Sugg Ryan 2004a).3 Rawsthorn was also interested in Spry and asked if I would be interested in curating an exhibition that autumn. I had to decline because of existing work commitments. I was disappointed to discover subsequently that the Museum was going ahead with an exhibition in 2004 without my involvement. Between 1993 when I curated Ideal Homes and 2004 when Constance Spry: A Millionaire for a Few Pence opened at the Design Museum, there was much research in design history and related disciplines into so-called ‘amateur’ practices, such as do-it-yourself and homemaking. Studies, such as Alison J. Clarke’s on Tupperware (1999), explored the boundaries between professional and amateur design, consumption practices and popular taste. This interest was shared by a growing number of young designers who re-used mundane domestic objects. This was a common strategy, for example, among the work of the Dutch Droog Design Collective in the early 1990s, with examples such as Tejo Remy’s Milk Bottle Lamp (1991), which turned a group of twelve milk bottles in rows of three by four (resembling the arrangement of a Dutch milk crate) into a chandelier. Another example was Paul Cocksedge’s Styrene (2003), a large globe-shaped light constructed from polystyrene vending machine cups, which was exhibited at the Design Museum. Given these preoccupations in design history and contemporary practice, Constance Spry (1886–1960) was an entirely worthy subject for a Design Museum exhibition. For nearly thirty years Spry had a marked influence on the British home and garden through her books, demonstrations, broadcasts and courses (Coxhead 1975; Grennan and Williams 1999; Shephard 2011). Primarily concerned with, as the title of one of her books declared, How to Do the Flowers (1953), she advised her mostly female audience on how to meaningfully and personally decorate their homes with flowers. It is tempting to dismiss Spry’s books as catering only to those with large gardens and staff, but this overlooks her insistence on using material from the kitchen garden (or allotment) such as kale, as well as sourcing berries and wildflowers from hedgerows. Gardening in the first half of the twentieth century was both a national preoccupation and a necessity (Preston 1995). Such criticisms also ignore the tendency of the public to read up a class and the popularity of lending libraries in the period. Spry suggested to her readers that they should choose a vessel with as much care as they would a dress; this could include improvizing with baking tins and junk shop finds. Furthermore, Spry’s flower decorations broke with the stiff, wired conventions of the day by combining unusual and commonplace flowers, foliage, vegetables and fruit in flowing, informal, often asymmetric arrangements in solid blocks of colour inspired by Dutch sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury flower paintings and her own important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century flower books. The Constance Spry exhibition followed a series of exhibitions at the Design Museum about fashion: trainers (Nike), high fashion footwear (Manolo Blahnik) and hats (Philip Treacy). Rawsthorn, who had 57

Design Objects and the Museum

increased annual visitor figures by twenty per cent to over 150,000, chose this programme, which represented a new direction for the Museum. It could be argued that this upturn in the Museum’s visitor figures was an endorsement of Rawsthorn’s exhibitions policy. However, James Dyson, chair of the Museum’s trustees, resigned in protest at Rawsthorn’s exhibitions policy, claiming that it privileged style over design (Glancey 2004). Conran (2004) saw the Spry exhibition as ‘off the radar’ and a betrayal of the founding principles of the Museum to ‘explore the industrial design of quantity-produced products’ and threatened to withdraw funding for the Museum. Bayley (2004), the Museum’s founding Director, also expressed outrage at the idea of flowers as design, declaring, ‘You know where you can stick these’. There seemed to be an unspoken modernist and functionalist gender politics behind this furore (Attfield 1989). Perhaps Conran, Dyson and Bayley perceived a feminization of the Design Museum in its recent exhibitions on fashion and the domestic sphere? As Dejan Sudjic (2004) (who became Rawsthorn’s successor in 2006) pointed out, Conran and Dyson appeared to ‘feel uneasy at ignoring the message of form following function that they were schooled in, and are now expecting a new generation to go back to the Bauhaus’. Such notions of ‘good design’, I argued at the time (Sugg Ryan 2004b), are ‘predicated on out-dated paternalistic, modernist, middle-class notions of taste, favouring industrial design’ and mass production over other forms of design activities. The Spry exhibition provoked a public row about the future of the Design Museum and the constituents of the practice of design. In a spirited defence of Spry following Dyson’s resignation, the historian Kathryn Hughes (2004) coined the term ‘high-society mimsiness’ to describe Spry’s later years. Unfortunately, in its selective coverage of Spry’s career the exhibition encouraged this view and it was consequently this aspect to which Conran (2004) objected so strongly. As Bayley (2004) put it, for Conran ‘Spry represents the artless bourgeois mediocrity he made it his life’s purpose to eradicate’. Ironically, Conran has much in common with Spry in his desire to improve and beautify people’s houses. However, whereas Conran sought to achieve this through taking away an element of choice and self-expression from consumers by selecting products that fulfilled specific criteria of ‘good design’, Spry may be seen to have offered greater opportunities for individual creativity and design. Thus in a review I wrote at the time of the exhibition (Sugg Ryan 2004c), I defended the right of the Museum to stage the show while detailing my criticisms of the ways in which it was curated, particularly its lack of information on Spry’s early career and general lack of context for her work.

Conclusion: What is design? Revisiting the Design Museum Spry furore, I have been quite taken aback by the column inches it generated at the time and subsequently. Sue Shephard’s (2011) recent biography of Spry opens with an account of the exhibition and the ensuing scandal. Of all the contributions to the debate the poet James Fenton’s (2004) defence of Spry as part of an ‘uncensored history of design’ stands out and remains a challenge to design museums. This is what I set out to do in Ideal Homes at the Design Museum; to disrupt the white modernist space of the museum. Museums had begun to look towards the gimmicks of the heritage sector, using actors, animated models and elaborate reconstructions (Corner and Harvey 1991) but I wanted to see what could be learnt from the commercial trade exhibition and its elevation of the everyday. In Ideal Home I curated an exhibition that explicitly engaged with issues of class and gender, which included objects for whom no designers could be named and that might be considered ‘bad design’. Finally, I wanted to point to the possibility of multiple and changing meanings at various points of consumption in the life histories of objects as well as in their production. The academic discipline of design history has changed hugely in the intervening years, shaking off its modernist linear narratives and focus on ‘good design’, for example in considering the possibility of multiple 58

Ideal Homes and Constance Spry at the Design Museum, London

modernisms and middlebrow and traditionalesque design, as well as ‘amateur’ practices and DIY (Reed 2004; Fallan 2009; Turney 2009). Designers have also played with the boundaries between art and design, re-using ‘everyday’ things and exploring the performative potential of objects (Williams 2009; Taylor 2013). However, design museums have yet to significantly engage with these changes. So before we can consider the future of design museums we need to ask the question ‘what is design?’ and what is the role of the discipline of design history within the museum?

Acknowledgements This research was part of a programme of activities undertaken for a British Academy Mid-Career Research Fellowship in 2012–2013.

Notes 1. The exhibition is still running and is now known as the Ideal Home Show. Media 10 purchased it from the Daily Mail in 2010. 2. Utility: UK government scheme run between 1942 and 1952 to cope with shortages of raw materials, which resulted in simple furniture without ornament in an Arts and Crafts style (Dover 1991). 3. I originally wrote my entry on Constance Spry in 1999; it was published in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004.

References Attfield, J. (1989) ‘Form/Female Follows Function/Male’. In Walker, J. A. (ed.), Design History and the History of Design. London: Pluto (pp. 199–225). Attfield, J. and Kirkham, P. (eds) (1989) A View From the Interior: Feminism. Women and Design. London: Women’s Press. Andrews, M. (1997) The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Bayley, S. (2004) ‘Focus: You Know Where You Can Stick These’, The Independent on Sunday, 3 October 2004. Available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/focus-you-know-where-you-can-stick-these-7907407. html (Accessed 14 July 2014). Bourdieu, P. (1993) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London and New York: Routledge. Clarke, A. J. (1999) Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press. Conran, T. (2004) ‘Letters: Concepts of Design’, The Guardian, 5 October 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian. com/theguardian/2004/oct/05/guardianletters1 (Accessed 18 July 2014). Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (1991) ‘Mediating Tradition and Modernity: The Heritage/Enterprise Couplet’. In Corner, J. and Harvey, S. (eds), Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of a National Culture. London and New York: Routledge (pp. 45–75). Coxhead, E. (1975) Constance Spry. London: Luscombe. Dover, H. (1991) Home Front Furniture: British Utility Furniture 1941–1951. London: Scolar Press. Fallan, K. (2009) ‘One Must Offer “Something For Everyone”: Designing Crockery For Consumer Consent in 1950s Norway’, Journal of Design History, 22(2), 133–149. Fenton, J. (2004) ‘A Rose Among Thorns’, The Guardian, 16 October 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2004/oct/16/1 (Accessed 18 July 2014).

59

Design Objects and the Museum Glancey, J. (2004) ‘Dyson Resigns Seat at Design Museum’, The Guardian, 28 September 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/sep/28/arts.artsnews (Accessed 14 July 2014). Grennan, S. and Williams, V. (1999) The New Mauve: Flower Arrangements by Constance Spry. London: Shoreditch Biennale. Hughes, K. (2004) ‘Say it with Flowers’, The Guardian, 30 September 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2004/sep/30/4 (Accessed 18 July 2014). Jenkinson, P. (1992) ‘Material Culture: People’s History and Populism: Where Do We Go From Here?’ In Pearce, S. M. (ed.), Museum Studies in Material Culture. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press (pp. 139–152). Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford and Cambridge, MA : Blackwell. Morris, M. (1988) ‘Things to do with Shopping Centres’. In Sheridan, S. (ed.), Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism. London: Verso (pp. 193–225). Porter, G. (1988) ‘Putting Your House In Order: Representations of Women and Domestic Life’. In Lumley, R. (ed.), The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London and New York: Routledge (pp. 102–127). Preston, R. (1995) ‘Little English Landscapes: Developing Suburban Garden Between the Wars’, Things, 2, 69–88. Reed, C. (2004) Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Robinson, J. (2012) A Force To Be Reckoned With: A History of the Women’s Institute. London: Virago. Ryan, D. S. (1997) The Ideal Home Through the Twentieth Century. London: Hazar. Schwartz Cowan, R. (1989) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. London: Free Association Books. Shephard, S. (2011) The Surprising Life of Constance Spry. London: Pan. Sudjic, D. (2004) ‘How a Flower Arrangement Caused Fear and Loathing’, The Observer, 3 October 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/oct/03/art3 (Accessed 18 July 2014). Sugg, D. (1993) ‘Redefining Modernism: Ideal Homes at London’s Design Museum’, Journal of Museum Education, 18(3), 11–14. Sugg Ryan, D. (2004a) ‘Spry [née Fletcher], Constance (1886–1960), Floral Artist’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online: http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101036226/ Constance-Spry (Accessed 14 July 2014). Sugg Ryan, D. (2004b) ‘Letters: Design Must Be More than Machines’, The Guardian, 8 October 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2004/oct/08/guardianletters1 (Accessed 14 July 2014). Sugg Ryan, D. (2004c) ‘Constance Spry: A Millionaire for a Few Pence, Design Museum’, Home Cultures, 2(1), 123–130. Taylor, D. (2013) ‘ “After a Broken Leg: Jurgen Bey’s Do Add Chair” and the Everyday Life of Performative Things’, Design and Culture, 5(3), 357–374. Turney, J. (2009) The Culture of Knitting. Oxford: Berg. Vickery, A. (1993) ‘Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751–81’. In Brewer, J. and Porter, R. (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods. London: Routledge (pp. 274–304). Williams, G. (2009) Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design: Narrative in Design Art. London: V&A Publishing.

60

CHAPTER 6 GHOSTS AND DANCERS: IMMATERIALS AND THE MUSEUM Jana Scholze

In 1985 Jean-François Lyotard curated the celebrated and critically acclaimed exhibition: Les Immatériaux. Commissioned by the design and architecture department at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, this show is presumed to be one of the first exhibitions which critically looked at the technological transformation from an industrial to an information society. The exhibition brought together objects ranging from robots to personal computers, holograms, interactive sound installations and 3D film, as well as paintings, sculpture and photographs. It addressed the relationship between information and materiality, content and expression but also the exhibition as discursive and administrative practice. Lyotard’s exhibition posed the principal curatorial question: do ‘immaterials’ leave the relationship between human beings and material unaltered or not? Eschewing standard exhibition practices, Les Immatériaux presented the spectator with a labyrinth-like space within a spectacular theatrical setting designed by Francoise Michel. Heavy contrast, dark colours, directional lighting and headphones internalized the space, which became as much mental as physical and turned a public space into a private realm. The exhibition rejected the conventional museum model that presents narratives in which the visitor is to become absorbed. Instead, the display of and about immaterials was defined as one with electric fields, dead ends and no definite perspectives. It presented a labyrinth of questions that might elicit feelings of being lost and the incapacity to exhaust the possibilities for connections, relations and meaning. As such, the exhibition revealed the means by which our sense of reality has been materialized and rendered insecure through techno-scientific immaterialization. Importantly, those means are not just theoretical figures but precise signifiers of the fundamental transformation from a mechanical to an electronic society. In addition, figures and tropes, such as labyrinth, rupture and open ends testify to the deep rooting of the exhibition concept in poststructuralist and postmodernist discourse. Les Immatériaux was a place where this debate found a material form. The reception of the exhibition has a long history of critique and analysis, interestingly more so from the perspective of an art museum rather than a design museum. Current museum practice shows that despite such debates most decisions about collecting and acquiring – with regard to notions of immateriality – are (still) made first and foremost from a pragmatic position rather than being negotiated on a conceptual and theoretical level. In general, such intangible material is rarely collected or displayed. A report by Charlie Gere, following a fellowship at Tate in 2002, showed that work which Gere described as ‘new media art’ was underrepresented at Tate. Gere, looking at ‘the role of the gallery in the digital age’, specifies: ‘In particular, work that is interactive, process-based or that involve networks, systems and feedback, are generally not catered for. The new media works now being collected and displayed by Tate are almost entirely static, even if they are time-based, in that they do not alter in response to interaction or their environment’. Gere strongly encouraged art museums – and this may be applied to design museums as well – to engage with ‘new media art’ and concluded, ‘I would go as far as to suggest that no attempt to understand art of that period can be undertaken without taking into account such work’ (Gere 2002:12). Admittedly, despite a history of debating issues around networks and the disappearance of tangible objects, the complexities of and transformations within a networked society seem to be far more fundamental and to 61

Design Objects and the Museum

happen much faster than ever imagined. In this context, it might seem rather a niche concern to reflect on the challenges of those results for museums. However, as museum collections and exhibitions attempt to provide representations, interpretations and speculations of historic but also current situations and conditions to fulfil their mission to ‘write history’, they need to accumulate material as source and evidence of such particular moments. The changes in design practice today challenge and even reject the conventional methods of collecting and exhibiting as will be described here. Thus, in light of the increased complexity of design and production practice in the past century, when it comes to intensifying research and examination, urgency seems justified. Recent developments of electronic and digital products changed society, culture and politics in an incommensurable way. We have experienced the transition from a post-industrial to a digital society operating in a global world. Those changes were preceded by a dramatic shift in designing and making objects. The materiality of objects is changing; they have become flexible, ephemeral, and may sometimes even disappear completely. But not only that, with the shift from a problem-solving to a problem-processing approach the focus has changed from considerations of objects, images and spaces to investigation and provision of relationships and structures. Conventional design disciplines seem to modify or merge at the same time as new disciplines emerge, such as service and system design, open source design, social, critical and speculative forms and others. Processes and systems are increasingly dominating design practice, with little or no intention to produce a tangible object as the final result. Quite often it is interaction, experience and critical inquiry that are the desired outcomes. Such a situation is challenging for museums that are by definition the place where tangible objects are collected, stored and displayed. It needs to be emphasized that in addition to our electronic and digital environment, which is in many respects so obviously detached and uncoupled from our material world, the move towards process-driven design practices demonstrates other (un-digital) forms of dematerialization. One of the early voices to demand, comment and theorize such practices was Victor J. Papanek who in 1970 announced, in his seminal text Design for the Real World, ‘It is about time that industrial design, as we have come to know it, should cease to exist’ (1970:7).1 His vision of an alternative design culture has become known today as design activism. One of its most dedicated commentators and critics, Guy Julier, offers a definition: ‘Design activism reallocates resources, reconfigurates systems and reprioritises interests. It is necessarily broad in scope and aims. In campaigning terms it includes communication forms to incite participation in movements that cross from survival values to self-expression values’ (2013:145). Design and/or craft activities are understood as practices that afford agency and stimulate change in social systems and relationships. Often, the place and space of politically motivated design activism is the urban environment. As the term ‘activism’ suggests, the focus is on predominantly public action, criticism and even protest by using communication as a tool. There is no intention to produce objects for consumption. However, besides those intangible practices, Julier points out that: ‘Design activism also produces campaigning artefacts – reflexive objects that function in utilitarian terms, but through these also politicize’ (2013:145).2 What Julier describes with the terms ‘reflexive’ and ‘politicize’ emphasizes the intention of particular interactions and processes to stimulate activism. The objects are a means and sometimes a medium to encourage interaction and response but are also only one element within the process. The current conventions of museum practices do not allow or cater for the integration of action, process and experience.3 Rather, they leave curators with only documentation as the primary modus of operation. More than ever displays driven by the intention to present and re-present history seem to demand a precise analysis of the object, as well as its ability to communicate complex relations, conditions and contexts. Considerations of experimentation, performance and aesthetics have to be taken into account. This chapter focuses on collecting and display practices and will negotiate the ‘disappearance’ of things with notions of 62

Immaterials and the Museum

documentation and archiving; it questions what the ‘museum object’ can be described as when its condition is ephemeral, transformative or a representation in textual or visual form. With regard to the intention of collecting and re-presenting history, the implications for agency and medium will be negotiated and suggestions will be made for an extended understanding of the term, object. The digital world is complementing, challenging and complicating our dealings with and perceptions of the real world. A telling moment of that complexity and confusion was the British government’s handling of the data collected by Guardian journalists related to the NSA (National Security Agency). The Guardian and the Washington Post were the first newspapers to publish (6 June 2013) revelations by Edward Snowden of mass-surveillance programmes by the NSA and other intelligence agencies after a threat of legal action by the British government.4 The Guardian undertook to destroy their hardware because of the insistence of the UK government that the material be destroyed or surrendered. This act can be understood as a symbolic and – through extensive media coverage – semi-public act of demonstrating power and taking control. The data, nonetheless, was left untouched, secure and available in multiple digital storage systems. In addition to this political demonstration of power, the insistence on material destruction shows, on the one hand, a firm belief in tangible material but also our helplessness and unease when dealing with the virtual world.5 At the Glow Festival in Eindhoven in 2011, the English architect Liam Young and his studio, Tomorrows Thoughts Today,6 presented an air-borne nomadic infrastructure called Electronic Countermeasures.7 Taking inspiration from US government drones and re-appropriating aerial reconnaissance and police surveillance components, Young provided a ‘pirate’ Internet. A fleet of GPS (Global Positioning System) enabled quadcopter server drones floated in formation to temporarily transmit their own Wi-Fi network, before dispersing to escape detection and reform again elsewhere. The public was invited to interact by uploading photos and sharing data during the time when the drones were flying above them. The drones responded by glowing a series of bright colours allowing impromptu augmented communities to form around the flock. Electronic Countermeasures reflected the role the Internet has played in recent activist and critical discussions about freedom, security and regulation. The usual way of representing projects like this in museums and galleries is by showing the material object, the drones, accompanied by a film of the event. The drones as material objects enabled the interaction without being able to represent it. The same drones could be used elsewhere to deliver military data or pizza orders. In addition, the drones are only one part of the interaction, albeit the most tangible. The process and experience of this temporary pirate Internet can only be represented in film, not presented under most current museum conditions. As the action and interaction is at the centre of comment and critique, only documentation can offer a material solution for keeping such projects safe and secure for future generations, as well as a medium for representation. The complexity increases with the possibility that the drones could be shown in action so that visitors could experience the ‘pirate’ Internet within the walls of the museum. The question arises about the significance of the original context and environment for which the project was commissioned. Would the safe context of the museum enable critical understanding through feelings of discomfort, or rather, would the experience seen through another medium – a film for example – provide the distance that might foster reflection and thought? Questions of place and space, as well as time, seem to dissolve when it comes to open source design, which endorses change and flexibility by definition. Open source designs are based on the idea of sharing and exchange, instant global accessibility and the principle of participation. Ideas of adaptation, modification and hacking are inherent in the design process. OpenStructures is a project by Belgian designer, Thomas Lommée, an open and modular construction system where everyone designs for everyone on the basis of a shared geometric grid. In the process different people design parts and components that are then shared and can be assembled into functional self-sustaining objects. Assembled from parts based on the same design principle, 63

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 6.1 Liam Young/Tomorrows Thoughts Today, Electronic Countermeasures. Photograph: Kristof Vrancken for Z33.

these objects can be repaired, taken apart and reassembled as something else. Such an open approach has fascinating ecological consequences for the manufacturing of objects as it implies a full cycle from production, adaptation to reproduction, which ideally would be self-contained. The Belgian curator Jan Boelen summarizes Lommée’s project aptly: ‘A car does not always have to be a car’.8 Open source design poses challenges for museums with objects that exist only virtually (both initially and finally), and that undergo an endless process of modification and change. The resulting tangible object(s) are similarly flexible and can be individually modified and customized. For the purpose of museum collecting the question arises, what exactly should be collected: the code, the file, a printout, a physical object? Open source, however, enables the museum to be considered as user, client and/or active participant, which seems a path worth considering, but with its own consequences. 64

Immaterials and the Museum

Figure 6.2 Thomas Lommée, OpenStructures, first campaign images representing component-thinking instead of object-thinking, 2009. © Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen. Choreography: Alexander Whitley. Film Production: Siya Chen.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) became just such a client (in many ways involuntarily) when it acquired the open source 3D-printed firearm, Liberator, by Texas-based Cody Wilson in 2013 (CD.1:1to16-2013). The acquisition was controversial as the integration of a design object into a museum’s collection generally validates and celebrates the design, which highlights that museums are not (yet) known as places of critical enquiry.9 The decision to acquire Liberator focused on the global debate on the use and application of non-regulated gun design and the consequences, extent and regulation of ‘weapon production at the press of a button’, which the production and firing of Liberator provoked. For design discourse in particular, Liberator proved significant, widening the debate from a professional forum, to become more relevant to large sections of the global community, on new production methods and techniques, the challenges and issues for regulation and law and the as yet unforeseeable consequences for society. Defining an object for acquisition is complex and protracted (Shannon 2013). In accordance with museum conventions highlighting provenance and design process, the V&A decided to acquire the first fired weapon, early prototypes and components of the production process. The chosen objects, however, cast a sceptical light on the adequacy of this curatorial routine. On the one hand, traces on the weapon testify the first firing act

65

Design Objects and the Museum

therefore assigning the object the status of proof but also of fetish. On the other hand, the individual parts represent the design process and are tantamount to an instruction manual, providing first and foremost a blueprint for reproduction. The decisive question here is what relationship the selected objects have to the specific (hi)story the museum wishes to tell and whether this or something else may be represented by the object itself. The museum’s curators declared the acquisition and especially the display as not a celebration of weapons. But how precise can a display be in preventing (mis)understanding and (mis)interpretation? More importantly, despite the Museum’s gun licence it proved difficult to import the gun as Wilson’s practice was under investigation by the US government. In an attempt to stop distribution, Wilson’s website was closed down; however this act had limited effect as the drawings had been downloaded several thousand times and made available on alternative platforms. As funding this acquisition demanded the display of the chosen object but it had not received export licence, the Museum found itself in the position of commissioning a print in London, described as a ‘stand-in Liberator’ of the object. Most institutions with a suitable 3D printer were unwilling to produce a weapon. Finally, the London-based firm, Digits2Widgets, printed the gun but argued convincingly and publicly against the printing of weapons.10 Their chosen solution was an ‘ersatz of the ersatz’ that could not be fired as the smaller parts of the gun were printed in nylon but the frame, grip and barrel were printed in plaster. The two materials were distinctly coloured to make the difference visible. Possibly because of the different materials the dimensions of the parts were slightly modified, further complicating the assembly. Thus the noticeably but somewhat unexpectedly distinct features of the object testify exactly to the issues the Museum wished to communicate: addressing the effects of open source design, individual self-regulation in the light of absent legislation, and the production of an individual object as a statement rather than a copy of the original. This example demonstrates the challenge museums face when attempting to communicate precise messages which demand close reading of the object itself in relation to all possible narratives connected to it. Conceptual design is an area of design practice that makes critical enquiry its very subject and prefers the gallery or museum space as the location for its interactions.11 At first glance, conceptual design might appear as an obvious and model example of intangible design production. But as a design practice that is not a theoretical form of design critique, conceptual design uses objects as one, and sometimes even the only, medium of communication. As such they appear as the ideal material for museums to engage with, for reflection, comment and critique of social, cultural, economic and political situations as well as for proposing alternatives. The London design duo Dunne and Raby (Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby) went beyond conceptual design and coined the term critical design, in the mid-1990s, out of concern for the uncritical drive and euphoria behind technological progress and its unlimited capacity for problem solving. They define critical design as: ‘It’s about meaning and culture, about adding to what life could be, challenging what it is, and providing alternatives that loosen the ties reality has on our ability to dream. Ultimately, it is a catalyst for social dreaming’ (2013:189). Critical design suggests an attitude rather than a methodology that manifests a sceptical fascination with technology not aimed towards a commentary but rather at concrete design proposals. The intention is to encounter possibilities and provide alternatives. But such proposals are not intended as new or ‘better’ solutions but as alternatives; nor are their objects the aim or result of a design process but act as a medium for interaction. They should stimulate questions, ideas and dreams that are negotiated individually. Material objects, or as Dunne and Raby specify ‘props’, play a significant role: ‘Critical design is critical thought translated into materiality’ (2013:35). Dunne and Raby’s proposals can serve as alternatives to current situations or attitudes but are increasingly located in the faraway future. The designers justify the move towards the future with the observation of ‘a monoculture that makes imagining genuine alternatives almost impossible’ (2013:189). Museum and 66

Immaterials and the Museum

exhibition spaces are their declared ideal places to introduce and debate those ‘What if . . .’ scenarios. In the project United Micro Kingdoms – on display in 2013 at the Design Museum, London – Dunne and Raby explored no less than an alternative United Kingdom with four super shires or regions, which were differentiated by the relationship between technology and ideology.12 The four combinations were: communism and nuclear energy, social democracy and biotechnology, neoliberalism and digital technology, and anarchy and selfexperimentation. They chose Britain to allow for connection and relevance to the audience. The project – fiction rather than a realistic proposal – was meant to stimulate reflections on our current technology driven society and environment, offering critique by way of rather dark scenarios that followed through various alternatives. The curated exhibition, however, became (unintentionally) a revealing example of the complex relationship between object and medium, narrative (fiction telling) and documentation. The speculative project was presented in tangible form; through imagery and props, and simultaneously with documentation of its making, and background about critical and speculative design. The museum intended to offer a fiction that the visitors were invited to immerse themselves in, while also providing a means to analyse the fiction and speculative design in general. At times it felt like watching a film with the director’s commentary on; an impossibility of two incompatible worlds prevented the intentional speculating and dreaming. One could argue that even design museums are not known as spaces for speculative thinking and dreaming. Or are they not brave enough to allow it to happen? Was engagement and immersion prevented by didactically laying bare intentions, structures and techniques? Given current conventions of display it seems justified to question what methods and techniques might be appropriate to present such concepts, critique and speculation. Might current museological practice hinder and obstruct communication, and foster misunderstanding and misinterpretation, as the audience expects results and definitions, not proposals and questions? Critical design challenges the visitors’ expectations that the museum is a place of knowledge and authority. Perhaps such an experience of critical design, or a general scepticism in relation to the appropriateness of the design discourse as context for understanding and interpreting their work, might have encouraged the London-based duo Cohen van Balen (Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen) to classify their project, 75 Watt, as artwork.13 They declare: ‘We understand our work is relevant to the discussion surrounding design objects, but it is important to us to stress that it does not operate within the discipline . . . In general we do not consider our work to be design, but art occupied with ideas surrounding industrial production, and therefore usually prefer to position it in the context of contemporary art.’ 75 Watt involved the process of manufacturing an object with the sole function of choreographing a dance performed by the workers in the process of manufacture. Therefore, human work on the assembly line is not focused on efficiency but on the performance of choreography; ‘mechanical movement is reinterpreted into dance’. The material result of the project is a limited number of objects as well as a short film edited from many hours of documentation made during the performance of the ‘assembly-line-dance’ in a factory in Zhongshan, China, from 10 to 19 March 2013. The project sought ‘to explore the nature of mass-manufacturing products . . . from the geo-political context of hyper-fragmented labour to the bio-political condition of the human body on the assembly line’.14 The final manufactured objects are an intrinsic part of the process but are neither result nor output; they are the medium to critically prove, justify and announce arguments as well as stimulate debate. Those objects, including the film, represent rather than present the project that was the transitory act of a performance executed a limited number of times during the short period of a few days. But to display the project in a design museum or gallery context, material representation will most likely be seen as a stand-in for the performance – an act dependent on the factory setting. It is important to recognize that the film is not just documenting the specific performance but has became the main component to present the work. Arguably, the presentation of the filmed performance only achieves critical power when brought into an environment 67

Design Objects and the Museum

allowing for comment and interpretation. A gallery or exhibition context can stimulate but also direct questions, critique and speculation, and the focus can shift dramatically with different types of exhibition. In addition to the above, 75 Watt could be understood as specific comment on current social and working conditions in Asia, also as a general enquiry into conditions of labour in the twentieth century, and as speculation on the future of work and working as well as on the division of labour; the elimination of human labour is avoided by transforming limited and repetitive movements into dance. Following from the above, the relation between presentation and representation is a question of object as proof or medium, of production or documentation. The term documentation is used in its widest definition including notions of performance and fiction. It encompasses objects in material form that serve as medium or, in the words of Dunne and Raby, as ‘props’ to address arguments or propose alternatives. As mentioned at the outset, when design practice moves its focus to processes instead of individual material objects, documentation becomes the fundamental material and medium to collect, present and communicate such projects to wider audiences. Earlier examples of social design and design activism either demand or involve documentation for presentation and collection purposes; this is not an exception but intrinsic to the type of design practice. This increased demand for documentation in connection with the decrease of material objects seems to bring the museum and its institutional techniques closer to the practices of the archive. Concepts of the archive as a place of perpetuity as well as discovery, order as well as stasis, public as well as private enquiry seem directly applicable. They were central to postmodernist and deconstructivist debates, where the archive was recognised as a place of fascinating, complex, diverse but often disparate if not contradictory meanings. In his influential book, Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida addressed the implications and presuppositions of information culture with regard to shifts in techniques of reproduction, the function of memory and indeed the structure of archives and the act of archiving. He recognized and debated how the arrival of electronic technology not only complicated the relationship between memory and record but also questioned the ways in which those devices supplement and constitute subjectivity. Derrida states: The technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationships to the future. This archivisation produces as much as it records the event . . . As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future (1998:33–34). The notion of active production in contrast to passive recording implicates not only a shift from past to present and even future but necessitates a complication and even fusion of medium and content. Text as document has physical and factual existence but its quality as static, factual proof of past events is questioned. Derrida rather describes text as a flexible medium that gets interpreted, translated and altered in its meanings according to individual and context. Derrida reminds us that the question of the archive (and we can comfortably draw comparison with the museum) is not so much a question of the past or even present but: ‘[A] question of the future, the promise of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps’ (1998:36). Following Derrida, the museum creates the past by showing what – in objects as well as documentation – it chooses to acquire, conserve, interpret and display. It is important to understand that this practice does not just affect our idea and understanding of the past but also of the future. The very act of collecting and displaying, which includes the act of not collecting and not displaying, establishes the inventory available for future generations. This leaves no option but to collect and display intangible objects. The examples above 68

Immaterials and the Museum

have addressed the complexities of a situation that has to take immaterials into account to present and represent processes and activities as well as speculation for debate. The current methodologies seem insufficient for precise analyses and theoretical enquiry, which are paramount to understand the elements and processes that drive and support communication and experience in gallery spaces. In addition, courage to experiment is demanded to allow for risky situations, untested speculations and the creation of spaces that stimulate debate, allow new thinking and encourage poetic experiences.

Notes 1. This quote only appears in the preface of the first Swedish edition. 2. For a detailed inquiry into Design Activism see this special edition of Design and Culture. 3. An important exception is the exhibition Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum (26 July 2014 to 1 February 2015). 4. See: http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jan/31/snowden-files-computer-destroyed-guardian-gchqbasement-video (Accessed 31 January 2014). 5. Immediately, the V&A declared interest in collecting the destroyed hard drives and enquired about their availability. For legal reasons this has so far proved impossible. 6. See: http://www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com 7. See: http://www.gloweindhoven.nl 8. Said in conversation. 9. One of those critical voices was the London-based designer, Ron Arad, who, in an interview with Wired magazine, declared when speaking about 3D printing: ‘I was so appalled with the V&A for getting the 3D printed gun. It was pure marketing’ (Compton 2014). 10. See: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/why-all-the-fuss-over-the-vas-3dprintedgun-its-a-symbol--not-a-threat-8829999.html 11. Critical design is also discussed in Chapter 11 of this book: Gillian Russell, ‘Curating Critical Design: An Embodied Criticality’. 12. See: http://www.unitedmicrokingdoms.org 13. Email exchange between the author and the artists, 27 September 2013. 14. See: http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/75-watt#

References Cohen van Balen ‘75 Watt’. Available online: http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/75-watt# (Accessed 15 May 2014). Compton, N. (2014) ‘Ron Arad Shares his Rules for Innovative Thinking’. Wired, 2 October 2014. Available online: http:// www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/10/features/ron-arad-ipad-designer/page/2 (Accessed 2 October 2014). Derrida, J. (1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Boston, MA : The MIT Press. Gere, C. (2002) New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age. Tate Papers. London: Tate. Available online: http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7411 (Accessed 22 June 2015). Julier, G. (2013) ‘Introduction: Material Preference and Design Activism’. Design and Culture, 5(2), 145–150. Papanek, V. J. (1970) Miljön och Miljonerna: Design som tjänst eller förtjänst? [The Environment and the Millions: Design for Service or Profit?]. Sweden: Bonniers. Shannon, L. (2013) ‘3D Printing. An Empty Space in the Law’. In Oosterman, A. (ed.), Volume 38: The Shape of the Law. Amsterdam: Archis (pp. 138–143).

69

70

PART II POSITIONING DESIGN WITHIN AND BEYOND THE MUSEUM

71

72

CHAPTER 7 INDIAN LIVING CULTURES: COLLECTED, EXHIBITED AND PERFORMED Megha Rajguru and Nicola Ashmore

UK museums are increasingly working with diaspora communities as part of their everyday practice. Sharon Macdonald in Theorizing Museums suggests that: ‘Museums are sites in which socially and culturally embedded theories are performed’ (1996:3). In other words, the perceptions and viewpoints of the society and culture in which the museum is located permeates the museum itself, which means the ideas and perceptions held within that culture and society are often identifiable in the design of an exhibition. The museum can be read as constructing a point of view. The focus here will be on Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s Hindu Shrine Project, the outputs of which were on permanent display between 2002 and 2012. It draws upon the examples of a permanent display of Hindu deities and temporary performance-based events involving the local Indian diaspora, which took place in the Museum. This process is examined as an exhibition design agenda of the postcolonial museum on the one hand, and the performance of nationalist Indian identities by the diaspora, on the other. The exhibition of the deities is located within a contemporary global context by drawing upon exhibitionary practices within a regional museum in Pune, India, the Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum. The Kelkar Museum exhibits its collection of Hindu deities by region and as art, while the Brighton Museum presents these as World Art and as Hindu. Within the context of Indian politics and UK cultural policy, the engagement of the museum with the diaspora is significant and will be explored in relation to the rise of Hindu nationalism and the limitations of cultural diversity practices in the UK .

UK museum practices – engaging the community In her 1994 book Museums and their Visitors, Eileen Hooper-Greenhill called for a re-visioning of the twentyfirst-century museum, one that would reform its curating practice and engage museum publics. She highlighted the need for the development of a clear social function for a ‘powerful new future’ (1994:8). Subsequently, the UK government from 1997 to 2010, colloquially known as New Labour, introduced the community engagement agendas. These posited museum publics as stakeholders of collections and a new era of museum practice emerged in the UK , shaped by funding policies and fuelled by ideologies of inclusivity as outlined by Elizabeth Crooke in Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges (2008:41–63). Since then, museums have worked increasingly towards community participation, developing identities that have seen their role expand from collection and conservation to include social mediation. Part of the New Labour programme was an attempt to implement multiculturalism, which became a policy of British government rather than a matter for advisory groups. New Labour envisaged a cultural policy; in 1997 it created, for the first time, a Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS ) and indicated, in particular, an important role for museums and galleries as points of access, ‘withdrawing admission charges at the national museums’ (Selwood and Davies 2004). There was an important convergence between the museum sector’s cultural diversity policies, informed by New Labour’s identity-based cultural policies and community cohesion 73

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 7.1 Hindu Shrine deities dressed in hand-crafted outfits made by the Hindu Women’s Group and Hindu Elders’ Group, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2010. Photograph: Joe Hague.

Figure 7.2 The Hindu Shrine exhibit, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2010. Photograph: Nicola Ashmore. 74

Exhibiting Indian Culture

Figure 7.3 Hindu Shrine and deities, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2010. Photograph: Joe Hague. agenda,1 and museum ethnographers’ existing work with communities influenced by the call for selfrepresentation.2 This convergence could be seen in what Christina Kreps refers to as a concern ‘with people’s living cultures and not just their past’ (Kreps 2003:149). This concern is evident within the Brighton Museum Hindu Shrine Project. There is a sense of a dialogue between the past (the collection) and the present (the participants), which can also be read as a statement by the museum about progress, from colonialism to outreach, with source communities being given a voice. Consequently, artefacts in museums can be usefully considered to function as contact zones, creating the possibility for new relationships to form around them, while acknowledging what James Clifford referred to as contact histories in his text Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997). Clifford uses the terms contact history and contact relations to describe ongoing complex and contentious relationships, with a past and a present, between source communities and the museum. Here we use the term source community in relation to Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown’s definition. Peers and Brown explain that the term source communities refers to both ‘groups in the past when artefacts were collected, as well as to their descendants today’. They argue that it applies ‘to every cultural group from whom museums have collected: local people, diaspora and immigrant communities, religious groups, settlers, and indigenous peoples’ (Peers and Brown 2003:2). The term notably does not privilege ethnicity or colour, which many policies and community engagement practices do, but instead suggests a relationship with a geographical place.

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery Brighton and Hove is a city on the south coast of England, UK . It has longstanding links with India, embodied in the architecture of the former royal residence, the Royal Pavilion, which later housed a hospital for soldiers from the Indian corps during the First World War. Other landmarks in Brighton and Hove that also reflect this connection with India include the Jaipur Gate (1886), the India Gate (1921) and the Chattri (1921). 75

Design Objects and the Museum

In 2002, the curators of the James Green Gallery of World Art at Brighton Museum commissioned the local Hindu Women’s Group and Hindu Elders’ Group to create a shrine for the Museum’s collection of Hindu deities. The gallery is named after James Henry Green, a recruiting officer in the British Burma Rifles, during the 1920s and 1930s. His charitable trust has contributed towards the funding of the shrine project and the ongoing partnership with the Hindu Groups (Royal Pavilion, Museum and Libraries). The nineteenth-century wooden shrine, held in the permanent collection, was used to enshrine the deities, which were also a part of the existing collection. The deities were adorned with elaborate jewellery and costumes crafted by the Hindu Groups for display. At the opening ceremony of the new museum display of the shrine the local temple priest performed the pranapratishtha ceremony (breathing life into the gods). The priest and the temple are from the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, which originated in the western state of Gujarat in India. A member of the Hindu Women’s Group reflected on the event in these words in an interview held at the Swaminarayan Temple in Portslade, near Brighton: When we install a God in any temple or shrine, we give it its seat. We perform the ritual and put the spirit into it. It has to be worshipped every day. But, that cannot be done in a museum. We worshipped the deities in the museum for the day of the installation only and then had to say our goodbyes. They have to be left spirit-less as they are mere statues when in a museum. That is the difference between this place, this temple, and the shrine in the museum. In the museum, the idols are meant for people to look at. This temple has the spirit of the God because we evoke it. We worship it every day, we light lamps and pray. In a museum we cannot do that. There are no ghee lamps or real flowers (Rajguru 2007). The divine energy was evoked in the museum ceremony held in 2002. The deities were worshipped and the ceremony concluded with the visarjana ritual: the priest chanted mantras and used appropriate hand gestures and performed the act of a ritual leave-taking from the deities. The visarjana is a ritual to mark the point at which the imbued spirit leaves the physical form of the deity. A similar ceremony was performed in 2007 after the shrine was removed for conservation and then reinstalled. Visitors and museum staff were present on both occasions, creating an audience in the gallery. The ceremony held in the museum involved ritualistic procedures such as the lighting of the sacred fire in the gallery, the use of ghee lamps and showering the deities with rice and fresh flowers. In the permanent display, the ghee lamps were replaced with light bulbs, and plastic flowers replaced fresh flowers. The adornments dressing the deities were retained and a text panel adjoining the shrine noted the ceremony carried out by the priest for the museum visitors. The original intention was to create a temple in the museum and a worshipping space for the local Hindu community, as evidenced by the local newspaper headline ‘Hindus unveil new place of worship in museum’ (Argus 2002). This, however, did not happen for a number of reasons, including the need for regular worship involving ritual procedures, which are not suited to the museum’s controlled environment as outlined in the interview referred to earlier. The staging of the religious ceremony in the museum space clearly exemplifies the change in role, from citizen into performer and actor. This is compounded by the presence of an audience of visitors and museum staff. This is unusual, as a ritual performance would normally involve participants engaged in the spiritual practice and not mere observers. In this process of community engagement, initiated by the museum, the Hindu women, elders and the priest performed symbolic ceremonies in the museum space. These events can be read as performances of the identity of Hindu-ness and an exhibition of the notion of Hindutva. Hindutva is a neo-Sanskrit term coined in the 1890s and is an abstract noun alluding to a core essence of Hindu-ness. Hindu-ness here refers to a constructed identity, which pertains to a unified Hindu religious 76

Exhibiting Indian Culture

belief system. This reading of the performances takes into consideration two distinct elements: one, the selfrepresentation of the Brighton Hindu Women’s Group and Elders’ Group as ‘Hindus’ and two, the rise of Hindu nationalism within colonial and postcolonial contexts in India. Tanika Sarkar, in her essay ‘Orthodoxy, Cultural Nationalism and Hindutva Violence’, critically addresses the rise of right-wing Hindu politics in late-nineteenth-century India. She states: ‘Towards the turn of the century, the Hindu revivalist imaginary came to depend more and more on the figure of an enemy that the community must fight in order to see itself as a community at all’ (Sarkar 1998:169). This forming of a shared community identity ‘would compose itself to combat Islam, Christianity and the liberal reformers’ (Sarkar 1998:172). Sarkar highlights that until the 1980s, mothers and wives of the right-wing Hindu political party had a key role to play in the domestic realm in the indoctrination of their children’s religious education, transmitting the meaning of Hinduism and patriotism to subsequent generations.3 In this scenario, women became key political agents at the forefront of Hindu right-wing campaigns and many have held powerful public identities. This historical and political backdrop reveals a layer of significance to the identification of the Brighton group of women and elders as ‘Hindu’ as opposed to ‘Indian’. This is not an attempt to classify these women and elders as right-wing Hindus; it does, however, address their identity as a collective and as Hindu as a legacy of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India.

Location of the diaspora as the ‘authenticator’ in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s collection The text panel accompanying the shrine implied the authentic nature of the display, stating that the shrine: ‘has been dressed by members of the Hindu Women’s Group and Hindu Elders’ Group’ (James Green Gallery of World Art). The groups were also involved with the identification of the deities and their arrangement in the shrine as explained by one of the members of the Hindu Women’s group in an interview: ‘Ganesh is the first God that should be installed before any ceremony begins. So He is at the centre, then we had Shiva Parvati, then Radha Krishna. There were so many and we could not recognise all of them. Some were from South India, some from North India’ (Rajguru 2007). It is important to note that the members of the Hindu Women’s Group and the Hindu Elders’ Group have links to the region of Gujarat in India. It is therefore not surprising that the groups could not identify all of the deities in the collection. The physical forms of many of the deities vary from region to region and have distinct iconographies. The regional nature of the Brighton Hindu Groups’ link to India was not noted in the exhibition and yet their regional specificity directly informed which deities they could identify and which they could not. The interpretation of the deities was therefore directly impacted upon by the exhibition design agenda that emphasized community engagement over collection knowledge. In contrast, implicit to the exhibition design of the Kelkar Museum are the regional, iconographic and temporal distinctions of the collections, which are highlighted through labelling.

Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum exhibition design The Kelkar Museum is a regional museum located in Pune, in the state of Maharashtra, India. It began as a personal repository of collections that belonged to Dinkar Kelkar (1896–1990). Kaka Kelkar (popularly addressed as Kaka or Uncle by his close associates) would travel to different regions across India collecting antiquities, from ancient hair combs to deities (Joshi 2011). His collection of gods and goddesses includes rare examples of Ganesha, Nataraja, Bhairava, Varaha, Garuda, Narsimha, Hanuman and Balakrishna made of 77

Design Objects and the Museum

metals such as silver, brass and copper or carved in wood. Kelkar’s interest in the workmanship and iconography of the deities is discussed in Pursuit and Rhetoric of Dinkar Kelkar: Each and every statue was different in terms of workmanship, its appearance, its stance, its ornaments and its apparel. Their times were reflected in these details. There was one Ganesha idol with six hands, which is quite rare. This idol was crafted in Nepal and done in Bronze. Kaka says that it is strange that the famous saint-poet of Maharashtra, Dnyaneshwar, refers to a Ganesha with six hands in his Dnyaneshwari but had never visited Nepal in his life (Joshi 2011:41). The display and labelling of Hindu deities in the Kelkar Museum reflect the collector’s expertise in the deities’ physical forms as well as detailed knowledge of their place and date of origin. His pursuit and study of Hindu objects of worship aligns with the twentieth-century art-historical practice of studying Hindu gods and goddesses as spiritual and aesthetic; qualities that art historians Ananda Coomaraswamy and E. B. Havell discuss in their work.4 Both Coomaraswamy and Havell emphasize the spiritual significance of the symbolism of Hindu deities, highlighting an art-historical and critical study of aesthetics as well as technical treatise. Notably, there was a significant shift in perception in the early twentieth century towards Hindu gods and goddesses that recast them from ‘monstrosities’ into ‘fine art’ (Mitter 1992). The taxonomic change and transformation of attitudes towards Hindu deities have influenced and dominated exhibition design since the twentieth century; such deities are displayed in glass cases, spot-lit and accompanied by labels. This design trope has influenced the Kelkar Museum’s display of Hindu deities. The deities are classified according to material and region but displayed as art. Their artistic value is further highlighted by the museum’s sub-text as ‘The museum of everyday traditional art’. This not only positions the collection of Hindu deities as art with regional differences, but associates it with the everyday ‘traditional’ lives of the people, thus revealing that Dinkar Kelkar adopted the European practices of art history and ethnography. Interestingly, there is no mention of Hinduism in the labelling. Each label identifies each deity, for example, ‘Sri Lakshmi, South India, 18th Cent. A.D.’ (Joshi 2011:43); ‘Lord Ganesh with Riddhi and Siddhi, Maharashtra, 19th Cent. A.D.’ (Joshi 2011:53). These labels highlight the heterogeneity and pluralism of the gods and goddesses from the subcontinent. In contrast, in Brighton Museum, the deities can be seen to be homogenized by the choice of display and labelling, for the regional distinctions are not apparent.

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and the Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum: ‘World Art’ or ‘Fine Art’? Fundamentally, the exhibition design present in these two museums reflects contrasting approaches. The Hindu shrine is located in Brighton Museum’s World Art gallery (James Green Gallery of World Art) in a section titled Believers. The deities in the Kelkar Museum, however, are displayed in sections such as Bronze Deities, Ivory or Sculpture, drawing attention to the material composition of the deity or its status as fine art, with regional differences reflected through the labelling (Raja Kelkar Museum). The exhibition of the deities as World Art in Brighton Museum irrevocably links them to their original use value or their status as ritual objects and as ethnography. Their location in the Believers section and positioned in a shrine further emphasizes the context of worship. Stanley Abe discusses the complex meaning of ‘World Art’ in his essay ‘Locating World Art’: ‘The desire for World Art depends on a double disavowal of the ineradicable historical and epistemological foundation of both art history and anthropology as contrary but interdependent forms of European knowledge’ (2011:139). 78

Exhibiting Indian Culture

This definition of ‘World Art’ is clearly reflected in the exhibition of the deities in Brighton Museum. Accompanying the shrine is a text panel with a photograph depicting ritual interaction with the deities in the Museum. This display verifies the significance and authenticity of the collection of deities aligned with Abe’s argument: ‘As verification, some objects are even labelled as having been used or “danced” on a certain date’ (Abe 2011:141). The positioning of the deities as worshipped gods and goddesses renders them as World Art in this context. This display homogenizes and erases the plurality of the deities, which belong to different regions in India, and instead exhibits them as World Art with use value for Hindus in Brighton. At the Kelkar Museum, as noted, religion is not overtly mentioned and the collections are instead described (in the entrance to the museum) as traditional art for everyday use. This usage is not explicitly discussed in the gallery space and notably the same importance is given to a hair comb as to a Ganesh statue. The deities in the collection at the Kelkar Museum are not ascribed value based on religion or use but on the craftsmanship and design distinct to the regions from which they originate. This is further emphasized through the fine art display that focuses attention on the aesthetic qualities of each deity, which are literally spot-lit; whereas the display in Brighton shows the deities in a religious setting – a shrine, dressed with costumes and adornments – that obscures the craftsmanship and iconography of the deities. The deities on display in Brighton are therefore valued, it seems, for their perceived use by Hindus living in Brighton rather than for the design of the objects themselves.

Conclusion The exhibition of Hindu deities as World Art within the James Green Gallery in Brighton Museum is part of an ongoing curatorial practice that started in the West and positions non-western artefacts as art with anthropological value (Abe 2011:138–139). The exhibition design agenda in the UK , driven by New Labour’s ideas around inclusion and cultural diversity, placed emphasis on the objects as deities used by a local ethnic minority group being made visible in the museum setting. The Museum in this instance became a platform for performing inclusion and engagement with ethnic minority groups. What is striking is that within ethnographic exhibitions of World Art this influence co-exists with the preoccupation of authenticity, so that in line with World Art or authenticity, a demand can be created for certain objects or performances that might not accurately represent a culture or a people. Within the context of Brighton Museum the source community was commissioned to create a Hindu shrine and perform rituals, therefore rendering the Gujarati diaspora in Brighton as religious and Hindu without considering the political and social legacy of Hindu nationalism in India. Yet, implicit in this practice is the assumption of a substantial level of authenticity, manifest in the objects in the collection through the involvement with source communities. The currency of ‘authenticity’ was illustrated in an article in Museums Journal in which Felicity Heywood states: ‘It is clear that the main benefit to the museum in working with indigenous individuals or groups is to bring authenticity to the collections’ (2009). The very presence of indigenous people in the museum is thought to convey authenticity and credibility, lending kudos, status and legitimacy to the collections and the museum. Yet, the Hindu Women’s Group and Hindu Elders’ Group, who were commissioned to identify the objects, were not in a position to do so accurately, due to the regional specificity of some of the deities. In this context, however, the community groups are located by the Museum as experts with specialist knowledge of their Hindu beliefs and practices. The commissioning of the shrine at Brighton can be considered as a product of the ‘contact’ between commissioner and authenticator or performer. Also implicit in this ‘contact’ is the agency of the source communities the Museum engaged. Consequently, the commissioning and exhibition design in Brighton Museum unknowingly facilitated the performance of Hindu nationalist identities or Hindu-ness in the gallery 79

Design Objects and the Museum

space. Visitors could have been given more insight into the dialogues that occurred between the museum and project participants, conveying a transparency regarding the construction of the display and the interpretation. Without this transparency the un-named institutional voice appeared to absorb and express the interpretative contributions provided by the diasporic community involved in the project. The knowledge and understanding about a number of the deities provided by participants, previously un-named and unknown to the Museum, went unacknowledged within the permanent display. This case study shows that curating projects in ethnographic exhibitions that feature local source communities is complex and important work. The uncomfortable tensions that can arise between the museum and its local communities create the frontline of contemporary ethnographic museum practice and provide an opportunity to reflect upon ongoing contact relations and histories.

Acknowledgements A version of this chapter was presented at the annual Design History Society Conference ‘Towards Global Histories of Design: Postcolonial Perspectives’ in 2013 at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and as part of the conference proceedings. We wish to thank members of the Hindu Women’s Group for sharing their experiences of working on the Hindu Shrine project.

Notes 1. The museum’s priorities detailed in the report Understanding the Future: Priorities for England’s Museums is a particular formulation of these cultural policies. It can usefully be considered as the culmination of nine years of policy activity, between 1997 and 2006, which had endeavoured to articulate the role of museums in this period of New Labour administration. See: DCMS (2006) Understanding the Future: Priorities for England’s Museums. London: DCMS . 2. For example see: Michael M. Ames, ‘Cultural Empowerment and Museums: Opening Up Anthropology Through Collaboration,’ in Susan Pearce (ed.) (1990), Objects of Knowledge. London: Athlone Press. 3. This has given rise to a growth of right-wing Hindu political groups that have influenced mainstream politics, resulting in the landslide victory of Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (a Hindu nationalist party) in the 2014 general election in India. For further discussion on Hindu nationalism see: Chetan Bhatt (2001), Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths. Oxford: Berg. 4. See: Coomaraswamy, Ananda, Selected Papers: Traditional Art and Symbolism. Roger Lipsey (ed.) (1977) Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Havell, E. B. (1911) The Ideals of Indian Art (1st edn). London: J. Murray.

References Abe, S. (2011) ‘Locating World Art’. In Mathur, S. (ed.), The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute (pp. 130–145). Ames, M. M. (1990) ‘Cultural Empowerment and Museums: Opening Up Anthropology Through Collaboration’. In Pearce, S. (ed.), Objects of Knowledge. London: Athlone Press (pp. 158–173). Argus (2002) ‘Hindus Unveil New Place of Worship in Museum’, Argus, April 2002. Bhatt, C. (2001) Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Idealogies and Modern Myths. Oxford: Berg. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Coomaraswamy, A. (1977) Selected Papers: Traditional Art and Symbolism. Lipsey, R. (ed.), Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

80

Exhibiting Indian Culture Crooke, E. (2008) Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges. New York: Routledge. DCMS (2006) Understanding the Future: Priorities for England’s Museums. London: DCMS . Havell, E. B. (1911) The Ideals of Indian Art (1st edn). London: J. Murray. Heywood, F. (2009) ‘Source Materials’, Museums Journal, 109(2), 23–27. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1994) Museums and their Visitors. London: Routledge. James Green Gallery of World Art, in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2002–2012. Joshi, M. P. (2011) Pursuit and Rhetoric of Dinkar Kelkar. Pune: Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum. Kreps, C. (2003) Liberating Culture, London: Routledge. Macdonald, S. (1996) ‘Theorizing Museums: An Introduction’. In Macdonald, S. and Gordon, F. (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers (pp. 1–18). Mitter, P. (1992) Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Peers, L. and Brown, A. K. (2003) ‘Introduction’. In Peers, L. and Brown, A. K. (eds), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London: Routledge (pp. 1–16). Raja Kelkar Museum, Collections. 30 April 2014. Available online: http://rajakelkarmuseum.com/default/ collection/k-coll.htm (Accessed 22 June 2015). Rajguru, M. (2007) Member of the Hindu Women’s Group interviewed by Megha Rajguru, personal interview, Swaminarayan Temple, 21 December 2007. Royal Pavilion, Museum and Libraries. World Art. 1 August 2014. Available online: http://www.brighton-hove-rpml.org. uk/HistoryAndCollections/aboutcollections/worldart/Pages/home.aspx (Accessed 22 June 2015). Sarkar, T. (1998) ‘Orthodoxy, Cultural Nationalism and Hindutva Violence’. In Roach Pierson, R. and Chaudhuri, N. (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing, Gender and Race. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (pp. 166–181). Selwood, S. and Davies, M. (2004) Capital Costs: The Impact of Lottery Funded Capital Developments, Introduction of Free Admission and Other Factors on Attendances at Major London Museums and Galleries. London: University of Westminster and Museums Association.

81

82

CHAPTER 8 TRIENNALE DESIGN MUSEUM: AN EVOLVING CURATORIAL PROJECT Virginia Lucarelli

As museums exclusively dedicated to design have become more widespread, a significant amount of research investigation has been focused on appropriate strategies to display and enhance design objects. The main aim of design museums, both from a conceptual and practical point of view, is to engage and educate visitors and this is frequently achieved by describing the relationship between design culture and the contemporary industrial design production. Since opening in Milan in 2007, the Triennale Design Museum, the first museum of Italian design, has embraced an innovative curatorial formula to allow a wide reading of design practices. Every year the museum deals with the corpus of Italian design from diverse interpretation viewpoints, changing key topics, scientific approaches and exhibition layouts. The scenario is mutable and offers its visitors an extended overview of both historical and contemporary artefacts, providing an excellent opportunity to establish a debate about design and its impact on everyday life. This chapter examines the six editions of the museum, from 2007 to 2014, outlining the different theoretical frameworks presented by the curators and the different relationship between objects and exhibition space. Its purpose is to investigate the circumstances under which this distinguishing curatorial solution has been adopted and to identify the individuals and stakeholders that are playing an important role in the development of Italian design.

How to exhibit the multifaceted nature of design? Until 2007, when the Triennale Design Museum opened its doors in Milan, there were no museums exclusively dedicated to design in Italy. One of the main reasons is that the Italian design heritage is diversified and fragmented across the whole of the country. When the museum was opened, the Director Silvana Annicchiarico articulated her belief that Italian design ‘is constituted of a multiplicity of subjects, making it difficult to define a uniform, centralized, organized system. There are numerous repositories of design dispersed throughout the territory, belonging to companies or associations that have spontaneously . . . created places for [the] conservation and [the] appreciation of “their own works” ’ (Annicchiarico and Branzi 2008:16). This widespread scattering of design from a theoretical, production and research point of view can be defined as a network system. This infinite collection is perhaps the real strength of the design system in Italy. However emblematic it was felt that there was a need to develop a central location that could represent and function as a national showcase containing a range of expression within a coordinated museum project. The Triennale Design Museum was founded on this principle with the ambitious purpose to present design as a conduit for memory, social changes and innovation. The museum aims to show the intense and deepening exchange between design and other disciplines such as art and architecture, as well as design’s interdependence and connection with craft and local culture. Andrea Branzi pointed out that design ‘is an integral part of the history of our country, about which it provides valuable information of a cultural and technological

83

Design Objects and the Museum

nature – but also philosophical, economic and domestic’ (Annicchiarico and Branzi 2008:42). Giampiero Bosoni, in 2001, had already underlined that: if we must speak of a secret of Italian design, it would be best to look in the right manner not so much at ‘its’ history – that of Italian design – as more widely upon the ‘great’ cultural history of the entire country: a rich, complex, at times contradictory culture, used knowledgeably by the most famous proponents of Italian design as part of their tool-kit (2001:13). Thus it follows that, ‘what design means and how it is applied has differed from company to company, industry to industry, country to country, era to era’ (Rawsthorn 2013:18–19), depending on many cultural and economic factors that contribute to influence its nature. There may be no single correct interpretation because design is an evolving story that is enriched each day. Hence the idea of a ‘museum that would be dynamic rather than static, that would not be crystallized in itself, or in its own . . . certitudes’ (Annicchiarico and Branzi 2008:17). Therefore the Triennale Design Museum does not follow a chronological order but is organized around main themes that try to communicate and portray the history of Italian design from many different perspectives and angles. Every year a curator and an exhibition designer are asked to provide their personal vision of the subject matter and the museum space, revealing changing affinities and connections between design, culture, production and society. In this way it is possible to relate more than one story and to allow visitors to cross ‘the same territory numerous times using different maps’ (Annicchiarico and Branzi 2008:17). Each year the new edition tries to answer the main question, What is Italian design?, and at the same time raises new ones. Each new question is an integral part of the others but does not exclude or replace the previous ones. This leads to creating a long, evolving narrative, which year by year may be seen to compose a mosaic of the multifaceted aspects of design.

What is Italian Design? The Seven Obsessions (7 December 2007–25 January 2009) In the first edition of the museum the curator Andrea Branzi identified seven thematic clusters that Italian designers have in common with each other and tend to repeat in an obsessive manner in their production.1 While answering the main query, he raised a new and complex question about why design is based on recurring obsessions and the awareness of designer practices. The existence of these obsessions ‘is something that cannot be identified in a style (but in many styles) or in an industrial strategy (which changes continually over time)’ (Annicchiarico and Branzi 2008:43). This a priori statement stressed the legacy that contemporary design has inherited from the past and the existence of an understanding between modi operandi. The exhibition showcased approximately 400 designed objects within the context of Italian history and culture from the Roman Empire until today. In the exhibition layout by architect Italo Rota each section was presented together with the screening of a film in the background, clearly showing the seven scenarios from one period to another. The first obsession was highlighted as ‘The Theatre of Animism’ and looked at the domestic environment, not only as a functional space but also as a theatrical stage where objects and people are part of an orchestrated play with defined roles and responsibilities. ‘The Great Middle Classes and the Sanctity of Luxury’ section illustrated the construction of the Italian middle class identity through the use and misuse of luxury artefacts, with reference to the concept of grandeur in the Byzantine Era. The ‘Energy’ part moved from Futurism to the present, describing the changes of production in domestic objects in the name ‘of a wearable, transportable, transformable modernity’ (Annicchiarico and Branzi 2008:156). In ‘The Light of the Spirit’ the curator recognized the tendency of Italian designers to combine lighting products with an idea of mysticism 84

Curating the Triennale Design Museum, Milan

Figure 8.1 ‘Super-Comfort’ section, What is Italian Design? The Seven Obsessions, curator Andrea Branzi, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 2007–09. Photograph: Giovanni Chiaramonte, courtesy of Triennale Design Museum, Milan.

and symbolism. The ‘Stackable Democracy’ mania, set in the 1950s and 1960s, was presented as having origins in the advent of washable, low cost objects produced in plastic, while the ‘Super-Comfort’ section focused on the wide range of Italian upholstered furniture, evoking the principle of comfort and mindful of the human body. Finally, ‘The Great and the Simple’ section dealt with the obsession of shape optimization that originally appeared in the search for archetypes during Early Christianity. Within these categories Branzi presented an overview of social and anthropological changes through the centuries, tracing the origin of Italian design way before the Industrial Revolution.

Series/One-offs2 (21 March 2009–28 February 2010) Arguably one of the key attributes of design is its interrelation with the dynamics and the processes of production. With Branzi also curating the second analysis,3 the museum shifted the focus of its investigation to the interaction between design and industry. The objects on display were organized in four taxonomic groups: experimentation, small series, large series and one-offs. In Antonio Citterio’s easily intelligible layout the visitor moved from a collection of experimental objects, to mass-produced and limited edition pieces and then on to custom-made products. The circular path of the exhibition seemed to have no beginning or end but to be in the form of a flow producing a continuous cross-fertilization between the categories. As commissioning of mass production significantly differs in quality, technique and programme from craft objects, the question arising from this exhibition was how new computer technologies could take a cutting edge role in the contemporary industry sector. Prototypes and experimental design are not necessarily destined to enter the market but are in high demand because they trigger new ideas that lead to mass production. Examining the phenomenon of limited edition design, Sophie Lovell highlights (2009:7) how many designers today ‘think of themselves as explorers, testing the boundaries of materials, process and medium’. As the curator did in the exhibition, Lovell stresses the idea that in the imminent future the process could become more significant than the product itself and asserts that ‘these designers are committed to experimentation; to exploring not just the nature and forms of what they produce but also the systems within which they are commissioned, created, received, displayed, appraised and used’ (Lovell 2009:7). 85

Design Objects and the Museum

In his narrative retrospective Branzi not only puts the emphasis on objects and their affordability but also on their distribution and consumption. Connecting the contemporary with other important moments in the history of design, he affirmed the importance of historical awareness so as to understand the origins of designed objects, and aimed at enhancing co-operation and interplay between designers and manufacturers.

The Things We Are (27 March 2010–27 February 2011) The hypothesis for the basis of the third interpretation,4 curated by Alessandro Mendini, is that ‘there exists a great, an infinite world, parallel to that of institutional design, an invisible, unorthodox’ world (Mendini 2010:32), which establishes a deeper connection with people than acknowledged design. The aim of the exhibition was to provide an overview of Italian identity, a symbolic diorama of the nation’s collective imagination, raising new questions about how we make our material culture and how it influences design production. The edition displayed more than 700 objects, which included art, crafts, fashion, souvenirs and everyday objects, all revealing a composite design frame. As Alice Rawsthorn wrote in her review of the exhibition: ‘Mendini has based his selection on the emotional bond that individual objects have fused with him and fellow Italians, rather than on the conventional design criteria of whether they are exemplars of form, function, innovation or eco-responsibility’ (2010). The selected works were by famous authors, artists, up-and-coming designers as well as unknown people. ‘They’re casually arranged situations, objects that are neighbours to one another; they are placed together, but they are not actually in a true relation among one another’ (Mendini 2010:32). In the encyclopaedic layout designed by architect Pierre Charpin, no logical criteria were used in the arrangement of the objects. Nevertheless, a network relationship was created causing an imbalance and confusion, which was at once impressive and intimate.

Figure 8.2 Exhibition view, The Things We Are, curator Alessandro Mendini, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 2010–11. Photograph: Fabrizio Marchesi, courtesy of Triennale Design Museum, Milan.

86

Curating the Triennale Design Museum, Milan

An analogous tribute to the intangible qualities of objects had already been seen in the exhibition Humble Masterpieces, held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ), in 2004, where curator Paola Antonelli asserted that: ‘the best contemporary objects are those which through their presence express history and contemporaneity; those which manifest with their physical presence the material culture that generated them, while at the same time speaking a global language; those which carry a memory and an intelligence of the future’ (2005:4). Mendini’s visionary synopsis emphasized the importance of design as a valuable testimony of our time and at the same time legitimized the cultural importance of everyday objects within an institutional setting.

Dream Factories: People, Ideas and Paradoxes of Italian Design (5 April 2011– 4 March 2012) After three design theorists, the industrialist Alberto Alessi was appointed as the curator of the fourth annual survey of the museum.5 The focus this time was on the ‘courageous captains’, as Annicchiarico identified them in her essay in the exhibition catalogue (Alessi 2011:16), the entrepreneurs of design factories that have played an important role in creating the Italian design system in the post-war period. Speaking about ‘Italian design factories’ Alessi (2011:23) referred to small and medium-sized enterprises mostly producing furniture, lamps and small decorative objects, combining technical and artisan knowledge. According to Grace Lees-Maffei (2014:288), emphasis in Alessi’s reading was placed on the pivotal role of the fifty-six industrialists or leading manufacturers celebrated and their ability to mediate between designers and production teams. The overview was organized around twelve key issues that the curator identified as fundamental to understanding the functional and poetic values of the products being manufactured, some of them indicated as flops and others as bestsellers. The economic aspects of manufacturing were also considered. In the exhibition layout, designed by Martí Guixé, information regarding the history and the financial results of the companies was displayed at the back of life-size totems of the entrepreneurs, together with 250 iconic objects. For the first time in the short history of the Triennale Design Museum most of the pieces exhibited could be freely handled, touched or sat on. The analysis of both quantitative and qualitative aspects of production presented in this edition raised two primary consecutive questions. On one hand can an object be considered an example of successful design if it does not meet with market satisfaction? On the other, can an object with a highly successful demand in the market be considered good design simply for this reason? Alessi’s intention was to underline the permanent relationship between form and function and to reveal an unexpected connection between commercial success and cultural importance in the design world.

TDM5: Grafica Italiana (14 April 2012–24 February 2013) In its fifth edition6 the Museum temporarily abandoned the world of objects in order to focus on the history and development of visual communication through the twentieth century, with particular attention to the impact of graphic design culture on our everyday lives. In their introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue the curatorial team of Giorgio Camuffo, Mario Piazza and Carlo Vinti, pointed out that: ‘Rather than reading the work of graphic designers as a reflection of Italian society or culture, this fifth edition . . . sets out to provide an understanding of how Italian graphic designers have been involved in everything that has happened in the country and helped shape its economic, social and cultural fabric’ (Camuffo, Piazza and Vinti 2012:18). 87

Design Objects and the Museum

The curators chose not to arrange the material in chronological order, which seems to be a distinctive feature of all the interpretations, but to create a taxonomy according to artefact types. A large rainbow welcomed visitors into the pages of a blank book where no graphic elements were written or presented. In the layout of ‘Fabio Novembre’ the vertical pages of the book, ‘which add a third dimension to what was almost completely two-dimensional’ (Camuffo et al. 2012:386) accompanied the public inside the different sections of the exhibition. The nine sections, which included Letters, Books, Magazines, Culture and Politics, Advertising, Packaging, Visual Identity, Signposting and Film and Video were structured in consecutive open cubes with the shades of the rainbow colours revealing the interrelationship between categories. Due to its scenographic setup this interpretation raised the question: Should museums treat graphic design simply as objects with a communicative significance or should an exhibition of graphic design go against its own function? Although ‘a wave of historical interest in graphic design occurred in the 1980s, with the organisation of exhibitions and publications by graphic designers themselves’ (Dalla Mura and Vinti 2014:46), the discipline is rarely presented as an essential part of Italian design culture today and its impact in our society still needs to be investigated. For these reasons the decision of the curators (Camuffo et al. 2012:21) to underline the ‘relations between Italian graphic designers and the international graphic design culture’, together with an emphasis on the interdependence with product and fashion design, represented a good starting point for the development of more contingent discourses.

Design: The Syndrome of Influence (6 April 2013 –23 February 2014) The sixth survey, conducted by curator Pierluigi Nicolin, constituted the first truly historical narration of Italian design to be held at the Triennale Design Museum,7 being the first edition to embrace a chronological approach instead of a thematic one. The strategic use of a metaphor in the title (in Italian the word ‘influence’ refers to both influenza and the ability to affect someone or something) emphasized one of the ‘most distinctive traits of Italian culture’, which is the ability to look around, select and ‘assimilate different things’ in order to convert them into something unexpected (Nicolin 2013:19). It is claimed by Annicchiarico that the goal was ‘to try to reconstruct the network of . . . suggestions, imitations . . . revisions, alterations that Italian design has been able to build and assemble over the years, combining its innate curiosity with its equally hard-wired vocation for pragmatism and assimilation’ (2013:15). To do so, the curator focused on people, especially on designers and manufacturers, as if seen through a magnifying glass over the years. The exhibition consisted of three parts, as did the layout designed by Studio Cerri, which stressed the differences between one era and another. The first part was about legacy. The works of ten masters of Italian design from the 1950s and 1960s were seen through original site-specific installations by ten contemporary designers, who interpreted the principles of their predecessors. In the second part, dedicated to memory, twelve interviews with designers, manufacturers and authors illustrated the social impact of the Italian economic recession of the 1970s, when design ‘became a form of culture, protest, reform and even conformism’ (2013:28). Finally, the third part showed how the ‘Made in Italy’ label of Italian design companies has positioned itself in the developing context of the international industry over the last three decades. The installations were ‘devoted to displaying the philosophy of key brands, the ways in which they determine their manufacturing strategy and image, and how they choose designers’ (2013:29). Past and present overlapped in this edition, clearly showing how the former overwhelmingly influences the latter. Therefore the question raised was how the future generation of designers will deal with the current recession and how they might transform it into pioneering principles and practices as their predecessors did. 88

Curating the Triennale Design Museum, Milan

Figure 8.3 ‘Cucina Sambonet’ installation dedicated to Roberto Sambonet, curator Studio Formafantasma, Design: The Syndrome of Influence, curator Pierluigi Nicolin, Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 2013–14. Photograph: Paolo Rosselli, courtesy of Triennale Design Museum, Milan.

Conclusion While much has been written on how design has influenced Italy’s cultural scene in the past, relatively little has been written about the synergism between institutions, practitioners and companies that has been active in the country over the last decade. Taken from this starting point, the curatorial approach of the Triennale Design Museum constitutes a successful strategy to emphasize significant changes and overlaps between practices and discourses in the field of design. Nevertheless, the interpretations of Italian design provided by the Triennale Design Museum in the last seven years distinctly demonstrate that the metaphor of the mosaic can never be completed because of the multifaceted and mutable nature of design. For this reason, the Museum should continue along this innovative line and work towards identifying new themes and perspectives. This task would be given to different curators every year in order to continue building the narrative mosaic. However, according to Annicchiarico (Alessi 2011:17), in the next few years, and in order to avoid the curatorial formula becoming ‘a mere exercise in style . . . the policy will have to be at least partly reformulated and conducted on principles which will also ensure some form of stability’. Therefore, from my own point of view, a possible future development is to consider the repetition of the approaches adopted by the curators instead of a forced search for new ones. If we consider a ten-year cycle and hence ten different interpretations, the themes proposed in the past could be revisited in the future by giving the assignment to different curators. The questions in the background for future analysis could be the same, as perhaps could be the titles of the editions.

89

Design Objects and the Museum

What will the obsessions of Italian design be in 2018? And what will our national identity be in 2020? In this way the mutable nature of the subject will be conveyed but the mission of the Museum will be achieved as well. Furthermore, only in this way will the concept of the Museum be truthful to itself and the zeitgeist, by playing an important role in bridging the past, the present and the future of design culture.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to Silvana Annicchiarico and to the staff of the Triennale Design Museum for providing the necessary information for this case study.

Notes 1. Andrea Branzi, Le sette ossessioni del Design Italiano, exhibition held at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 7 December 2007 to 25 January 2009. 2. Translation by the author. 3. Andrea Branzi, Serie Fuori Serie, exhibition held at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 21 March 2009 to 28 February 2010. 4. Alessandro Mendini, Quali cose siamo, exhibition held at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 27 March 2010 to 27 February 2011. 5. Alberto Alessi, Le fabbriche dei sogni. Uomini, idee, imprese e paradossi delle fabbriche del Design Italiano, exhibition held at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 5 April 2011 to 4 March 2012. 6. Giorgio Camuffo, Mario Piazza and Carlo Vinti, TDM5: Grafica Italiana, exhibition held at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 14 April 2012 to 24 February 2013. 7. Pierluigi Nicolin, Design: La Sindrome dell’Influenza, exhibition held at the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 6 April 2013 to 23 February 2014.

References Alessi, A. (ed.) (2011) Dream Factories: People, Ideas and Paradoxes of Italian Design. Milan: Electa. Annicchiarico, S. and Branzi, A. (eds) (2008) What is Italian Design? The Seven Obsessions. Milan: Electa. Antonelli, P. (2005) Humble Masterpieces: Everyday Marvels of Design. New York: Harper Collins. Bosoni, G. (2001) ‘Type and Counter-Type in Italian “Style”: Tradition and Innovation in Industrial Design for Domestic Spaces’. In Bosoni, G. (ed.), Italy: Contemporary Domestic Landscape 1945–2000. Milan: Skira. Camuffo, G., Piazza, M. and Vinti, C. (eds) (2012) TDM5: Grafica Italiana. Mantova: Corraini. Dalla Mura, M. and Vinti, C. (2014) ‘A Historiography of Italian Design’. In Lees-Maffei, G. and Fallan, K. (eds), Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design. London: Bloomsbury Academic (pp. 35–55). Lees-Maffei, G. (2014) ‘ “Made” in England? The Mediation of Alessi S.p.A.’. In Lees-Maffei, G. and Fallan, K. (eds), Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design. London: Bloomsbury Academic (pp. 287–304). Lovell, S. (2009) Limited Edition: Prototypes, One-Offs and Design Art Furniture. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag AG . Mendini, A. (ed.) (2010) Quali cose siamo. Milan: Electa. Nicolin, P. (ed.) (2013) TDM6: The Syndrome of Influence. Mantova: Corraini. Rawsthorn, A. (2010) ‘An Italian Designer’s Homage to His Native Country’, New York Times, 29 August 2010. Rawsthorn, A. (2013) Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. London: Hamish Hamilton.

90

CHAPTER 9 GALLERY ENVY AND CONTINGENT AUTONOMY: EXHIBITING DESIGN ART Damon Taylor

In London in the summer of 2009, two exhibitions showed examples of a type of nominally functional object that at the time was widely referred to as ‘Design Art’.1 The first to open was Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington. Upon entering the show, after passing some didactic panels, which explained that the work in the show could be considered ‘somewhere between art, craft and design’, the first thing the visitor saw was a bath in the shape of a dinghy made from oak and cedar. Next to this sat an artfully arranged collection of old furniture, net curtains and blankets, which together formed something like a makeshift funeral coach or stationary gypsy caravan. Across from this was an elegant though patently absurd wardrobe, the exterior of which was made from hundreds of enamel leaves that opened to reveal a bronze frame of branches, where, with a snake motif writhing down it, hung a single dress. In this first room, ‘The Forest Glade’, over the walls and floor, shadows of branches and leaves fluttered. All around strange and wonderful things revealed themselves to be nestling in bowers. Thus the collective effect was to give the visitor the sense that the pieces on show were being encountered in a forest glade, which, since most of the exhibits were created by Dutch designers, seemed to be in some fantasy version of the Netherlands. In this way Weiki Somers’s Bath Boat, Jurgen Bey’s Linen Cupboard House and Tord Boontje’s Fig Leaf wardrobe, along with the other exhibits in this opening space, were overtly framed by being placed into a themed environment, one bound together by the overarching concept of storytelling. A leather-upholstered bench in the shape of the cow from which the leather came, a table formed by log ends, a chair made from wild and arching metal tree branches; all were contextualized in the forest glade by the device of narrative, with quotes from texts such as Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ (2006), in the form of decals on the walls, serving to further confirm this association. As the visitor then moved on so they encountered a room themed as ‘The Enchanted Castle’ and finally found themselves in ‘Heaven and Hell’. In this way the apparent intention of the V&A curator, Gareth Williams, was to give the pieces in the exhibition a fictional context of use. That the conceit of this show was that all objects were in some way concerned with narrative, the ‘Tales’ of the title, is of less interest than the central impulse: that it was necessary to provide a setting for the works if the viewer was to be able to relate to them. The basic premise seemed to be that in order to show design of this type it was necessary to provide a context in which they might function, no matter how theatrical and patently artificial in character. Across town, in Ladbroke Grove, the Louise Blouin Foundation presented Design High, an exhibition that also showed work that was described as ‘Design Art’.2 Here the exhibits were positioned in an archetypal art world gallery space. Large sculptural pieces stood isolated, surrounded by space, with nothing to clutter the viewer’s aesthetic experience (Veiteberg 2005; O’Doherty 2000). Smaller works were positioned so as to be stood around and contemplated. Upstairs, a beautiful exploded cabinet, fashioned in what appeared to be bronze, sat suspended over an impressively large mirror that took up most of the floor space of the room that they alone occupied. At the entrance to the gallery a notice instructed the visitor: ‘Taking photographs of the artworks is not allowed’. Thus the curator of this show, Natalie Kovacs, had actively made the decision to show the work as autonomous objects of contemplation; that is to say, as ‘Art’. 91

Design Objects and the Museum

Through even the briefest comparison of these two exhibitions, which appeared simultaneously in the same city at perhaps a little after the apex of the works’ historical manifestation as Design Art, it becomes clear that the reception of this type of content-heavy work, produced as unique pieces and limited edition runs, which is traded and collected as though it were art, is extremely sensitive to how it is presented. Even though Telling Tales used a highly mannered and theatrical conceit to build a context of use in the form of the spaces inspired by different approaches to narrative, it was still resolutely an attempt on the part of the curatorial team to give the things being shown a sense of place. In Design High, the white cube construct turned the artefacts into art by denying such locational specificity. Since such consciously art-space environments fundamentally suggest that context has now become an art world dimension in which the pieces on show can ‘speak for themselves’, the implicit assertion of showing design artefacts in this way is that they have the capacity to operate and be understood as autonomous artworks in their own right. That is to say, in this form of gallery setting the physical nature of the space, the white walls and judicious lighting, the plinths and expanses of wooden floor, the quiet, and the behaviour of others looking at the exhibits, all act together to suggest that the design on show can be experienced as a form of art, as it is liberated from the need to be ‘merely’ functional in a utilitarian sense. Such a situation has prompted commentators such as Grace Lees-Maffei and Linda Sandino to suggest that in contemporary design, there has been a shift away from ‘the primacy of function’ to what they describe as ‘iconoclastic aesthetic experimentation’, which they argue could be said to mirror an increasing bid on the part of makers for ‘autonomy’ (Lees-Maffei and Sandino 2004). Indeed, in the Netherlands ‘autonomous design’ features as a distinct category in the annual Dutch Design Awards, and is increasingly used as a generic term to describe this type of work (de Rijk, Achten and van de Markt 2012; Object Rotterdam 2010). However, this raises the question of what the term ‘autonomy’ might mean when applied to the field of design. That is to say, what are the implications of asserting that there can be such a thing as autonomous design? On one level the term ‘autonomous design’ clearly alludes to this usage’s derivation from art practice and protocol: that there can be such things as ‘design-artworks’ that can sit in galleries, even though they are nominally functional pieces. However, in the context of design practice, the term autonomy also refers to a growing tendency on the part of designers to wish to be regarded as the authors of their work, with the attendant freedoms (and status) that such a position implies (Taylor 2012). Consequently the intention here is to demonstrate how these two shows, which presented to the public very similar work and shared the same historical moment, illustrate two very different strategies for responding to the emergence of ‘autonomous design’. It is then argued that such developments may indicate a fundamental uncertainty as to what the phenomenon of Design Art might mean, which has particular consequences for the exhibition of contemporary design.

Autonomous artworks If furniture and domestic products are beginning to be offered up to the public as partaking in, or claiming to possess, some form of autonomy, this would seem to suggest that design is making some sort of bid for freedom. Yet freedom is of course a relational term: it implies a freedom from; it suggests that there is an antithesis of boundedness and constraint that is being escaped. So, in design, what might this be? In art the concept of autonomy has tended to refer to the idea that this field of practice stands apart from the interests that otherwise determine the form that culture takes; that the artwork itself is an autonomous artefact which need only depend upon itself and its place in the discourse of art for its meaning and import. That is to say that beyond being art it makes no claims to function beyond the gallery; that its only purpose is to be art, an 92

Exhibiting Design Art

essentially self-reliant object of contemplation and reflection. This then is to suggest that art, both on the level of the individual artwork and as a form of activity, operates outside the dictates of culture as a site of critique where issues can be worked through only in relation to its own existence as art. In recent years such a retreat may have been challenged by the development of more relational approaches (Bourriaud 2002), yet arguably even this critique simply reproduces in a different form art’s autonomic impulse (Bishop 2004). And for all the rise of the art ‘project space’ (Bishop 2004), it is difficult to argue that the white-cube does not function to create a place where art can simply be art. In his detailed and difficult analysis of the nature of artistic autonomy, Theodore Adorno suggests that the condition of a work of modern art is radically split between the possibility of autonomy and its existence as a social artefact; that an artwork simultaneously resists incorporation within the fabric of the culture from which it emerges, as it is itself a part of that very structure (1984:8). As Alex Potts notes, Adorno does not seek to moderate modernist claims for the autonomy of art by arguing that it should be understood as having a partial or relative autonomy. Rather, art’s situation can be seen as ‘radically paradoxical’ in that on the one hand it figures a ‘possibility of autonomy denied by the administered world of modern capitalism’, while on the other it can be understood ‘as being immersed within a reality where sustained claims for subjective autonomy are only hollow illusions, or symptoms of an endemic social alienation and fragmentation’ (Potts 2004:51). As Adorno observes, this leaves art in a position whereby there is an essential antagonism between this oppositional stance and the inevitable embeddedness of art in culture. Thus he appears to argue that in art this separation has been productive, as art may be said to possess the capacity to resist the given state of things, allowing such autonomy to be the source of the utopian impulse that could be said to be intrinsic to such art. That is, art may be able to operate as a laboratory of alternative imaginings because of its dislocation from the materiality of the everyday, even if this is situated in the broader political discourses of culture (Adorno 1984:8). So for art, autonomy can be said to refer to its essential lack of utilitarian function beyond its existence as a site of critique and reflection, its very outside-ness in relation to everyday life (1984:227). Thus in this reading what art escapes through its autonomy is the need for it to be anything other than art. The problem for design is that it needs to be something other than useless if it is to be regarded as design; that is to say, even if it pitches up in the gallery, design must have a function.

Gallery envy As can be seen from the example of Design High, the primary effect of placing design into a white-cube gallery space is that objects immediately take on a certain sense of significance and importance. They are automatically imbued with the aura of the autonomous thing: the art object. In such a situation the protocols of the art setting have the effect of focusing the attention of the viewer on those characteristics of the work that are the most art-like – in this case the communicative and expressive elements of the design. As was proven some time ago, seen in the context of the gallery utilitarian objects immediately take on the aura of meaningful objects of contemplation.3 They cease to be chairs and tables and actually appear to become artworks that appear to consider ‘chairness’ or ‘tableness’. This happens because the cultural context of the gallery means that certain codes of reading or protocols of relation and interpretation kick in as soon as an object is exhibited in this way; this also has the effect of historicizing the objects as they appear to take their place in a broader discourse of ‘important’ design. This then has the effect of not just raising the status of the objects, but as a consequence it also enhances that of the designers. It would be misleading though to suggest that designers are adopting this role because they necessarily want to create art (some do, but most of them are pretty adamant that they are designers, not artists). Rather, 93

Design Objects and the Museum

they are doing this because they are beginning to want to be able to behave like artists. For example, Julia Lohmann, the creator of the Cow Bench from the V&A’s forest glade, observes that exhibiting in a gallery space gives her a scope for experimentation that is not to be found in the commercial world of mainstream design (2010). According to Gareth Neal, whose work also featured in Telling Tales, the fact that he creates limited edition furniture gives him the freedom to create in the same manner as an autonomous artist, whereby he can make what he wants in the way that he wants (2010). This desire to behave as artists, what might be described as ‘gallery envy’ on the part of designers, is thus apparently not born of an attempt to be outside culture, rather it is an effort to find a place within a system of designing and making that is not controlled by the dictates of manufacturing industry, and which confers the rewards, both social and financial, traditionally only open to those making art. So, while the design object in the gallery in essence borrows the autonomy created to maintain the art object, it can actually be seen that the practice of design becomes functionally autonomous to the extent that designers have attempted to become self-tasking individuals. In the space that was prised open by designers represented by the developing field of practice that in the first decade of the twenty-first century briefly came to be referred to as Design Art, the autonomy sought can be demonstrated to be that of the artist rather than that of the artwork. Instead of being born of the wish to capture for their output the status of the artwork, the freedom that many designers desire to establish can be demonstrated to be that of the role of the artist, as a self-determining free agent. Instead of wishing to be at a distance from culture, it seems that what is now sought by designers is the opportunity to be autonomous in how they operate, to originate self-set briefs and explore their own concerns without being restricted by the demands of working to order for an organization or a specific client. That personal status and financial reward may result from this manner of working is also unlikely to be seen as a drawback by those creating and showing design in this way.

Contingent autonomy Increasingly, designers are finding spaces where they can act as autonomous and self-tasking individuals, but this does not mean that what they are producing can be understood to be autonomous in the manner of artworks. As has been noted, for design to be design, it must to some meaningful extent be useful. The essential feature of design, if the word is to have any substance at all, is that it makes an appeal to function; that to one degree or another, if something is to be categorized as design, it must have at the very least a nominal purpose beyond its status as an object of contemplation. Thus what makes design ‘design’ is the fact that it is not autonomous; it must by definition at the very least allude to a life of use outside the hermetic confines of the modernist gallery. In a bid to make a space where they can work in the manner of artists (and accrue the attendant benefits), designers are making useful things, such as chairs and tables, and then placing them in the gallery. This is of course a strategy that more traditional craft practitioners, such as ceramicists or jewellers, have pursued for some time. Now this approach is being adopted by those who make more manifestly functional objects, such as furniture. They are doing this in an attempt to be as free as artists in what they are able to make and do. In this way they are using the changed order of interaction to claim a certain contingent autonomy as actors in the business of being a creative practitioner. Yet even as these designers are asserting themselves as authors, as Pierre Bourdieu observes, any attempt to become an author producer (who is thought to create the value of the piece) suppresses the question of ‘who authorises the author, what creates the authority by which authors authorise’ (1993:76). There is always a hegemonic structure that determines what the protocols will be, to which the author must then adhere if they 94

Exhibiting Design Art

wish to be accepted in their milieu. This is the essential contingency of such liberty. Though designers gain status and a certain form of freedom through the expedient of showing their work in traditional art settings, this is in spite of the fact that any such operational autonomy is purchased at the price of coming to be governed by the protocols of the art world. To be an artist is not to be absolutely free; it is to have bought into a set of strictures that allow for the production of objects that resist incorporation into day-to-day life. The gallery gives licence to produce what you will, but it demands certain dues in return (Danto 1981). In the development of modern art practice, it was in the 1960s that the problem of artistic autonomy was most fully confronted. As artists sought to create a space in which art could function beyond the ideological and practical conventions of the culture in which it operated, they did not however escape the action of protocol per se; rather they exchanged one form of structure for another. As Rosalind Krauss argues, at this time ‘the ontological labour of the modernist artist was to define the essence of Art itself ’ (1999:10). As she notes: ‘The specific mediums – painting, sculpture, drawing – had vested their claims to purity in being autonomous, which is to say that in their declaration of being about nothing but their own essence, they were necessarily disengaged from everything outside their own frames’ (Krauss 1999:11). In this way art came to be increasingly involved with its self-referential relationship to its own concerns and history. In the early twenty-first century, designers have added the gallery to their repertoire of possible fields of action because it provides a space where they can make what they like, in the manner of autonomous artists. However, in doing so, it seems clear from exhibitions such as Design High what the price can be in such a setting, where what is emphasized is the most art-like qualities of the work: that it becomes almost unrecognizable as design. Because design must always be about something more than itself, it can never be autonomous in the manner of art. This can leave design in the white-cube gallery looking a little clumsy, as it cannot claim to work only on its own terms, just as it appears somewhat moribund on a practical level because what is unique to its form, that is to say functionality, is inevitably suppressed.

Telling Tales and Design High While it seems perfectly understandable that designers should wish to have the same freedoms (and social status and financial rewards) as those that can accrue to successful artists, it is apparent from the example of Design High that to show design as though it were art may have the curious effect of making it look like little more than bad art. Autonomous design is an approach to practice that can be adopted by designers, but it should be recognized that it is not a category of object, that design cannot be autonomous because it is always about something beyond itself; if it is not, it stops being design. Natalie Kovacs ends her curator’s essay in the Design High exhibition guide by claiming that the design on show ‘offers an epiphany’, one whereby ‘we can be momentarily certain of a parallel reality beyond the plane of our understanding’. She goes on to suggest that ‘[f]inally, we realise our own actions and our own place within the eternal’ (2009:4). This seems a lot to ask from a chair or a table, even if they are particularly interesting examples. Yet in the gallery, all is convulsed into art. It must then stand or fall as art, and the construction of an overblown and hyperbolic rhetoric around the object is merely one tactic meant to embed the material presented into this discourse. In Telling Tales the visitor may have come away with the sense that the curatorial team had rather squashed the exhibits into their schema of storytelling in order to construct the rooms that contextualized the work, so that the theme had rather taken over from the individual complexity and nuance of the particular pieces on show. However, upon reflection it is hard not to conclude that, despite its highly artificial form, such an approach was adopted in an effort to negotiate the design objects’ absence of autonomy. Thus through such a 95

Design Objects and the Museum

comparison of these exhibitions it becomes clear that the provision of a context of use, where things are employed in the living of life (even a fictional and fantastical one), is to some degree necessary if the strange objects created by autonomous designers are to be experienced not as an uncomfortable form of pseudo art, but as useful things on show, that is to say, as design.

Notes 1. The auctioneer, Alexander Payne, is popularly attributed with coining the term ‘Design Art’ to describe work being sold at the auctioneers Philips de Pury in the early 2000s. See also Rawsthorn (2007). It was also used by the selling show, Design Art London, which set up in Berkeley Square in 2007 and 2008, thus the capitalized version is used here to denote not a movement, or even an approach, but a market-orientated typology. 2. The Louise Blouin Foundation is a charitable cultural foundation funded by Louise Blouin Media. The gallery hosts exhibitions and events intended to promote cross-cultural co-operation and creativity. Design High was a group exhibition created in co-operation with the commercial gallery, the Carpenters Workshop Gallery, which also contributed to Telling Tales at the V&A. 3. It does not seem necessary to rehearse here the import of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in the history of twentiethcentury art, but for a pertinent examination of the situational specificity of the readymades see: Helen Molesworth (1998) ‘Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades’, Art Journal, 57(4), 50–61.

References Adorno, T. (1984) Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Benjamin, W. (2006) ‘The Storyteller’. In Hale, D. J. (ed.), The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing (pp. 361–378). Bishop, C. (2004) ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110, 51–79. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. London: Polity. Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Reel. Carpenters Workshop Gallery (2014) Available online: http://carpentersworkshopgallery.com/en/Gallery-Info/about (Accessed 10 August 2014). Danto, A. (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Boston, MA : Harvard University Press. De Rijk, T., Achten, A. and van de Markt, H. (eds) (2012) The Dutch Design Yearbook 2012. Rotterdam: Nai 010. Kovacs, N. (2009) Design High Exhibition Guide. London: Louise Blouin Foundation. Krauss, R. (1999) A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson. Lees-Maffei, G. and Sandino, L. (2004) ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships Between Design, Craft and Art’, Journal of Design History, 17(3), 207–220. Lohmann, J. (2010) Personal interview with the author at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London, 10 June 2010. Louise Blouin Foundation (2014) Available online: http://www.ltbfoundation.org/foundation.htm (Accessed 10 August 2014). Molesworth, H. (1998) ‘Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades’, Art Journal, 57(4), 50–61. Neal, G. (2010) Personal interview with the author at the designer’s studio, Dalston, London, 11 August 2010. Object Rotterdam (2010) Available online: http://www.objectrotterdam.nl/en/home/ (Accessed 22 December 2010). O’Doherty, B. (2000) Extended Edition Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space. Oakland, CA : University of California Press. Potts, A. (2004) ‘Autonomy in Post-war Art; Quasi Heroic and Casual’, Oxford Art Journal, 27(1), 45–59. Rawsthorn, A. (2007) ‘The Uses and Misuses of Design Art’, International Herald Tribune. Available online: http://www. nytimes.com/2007/10/05/style/05iht-design8.html (Accessed 12 September 2008). Taylor, D. (2012) ‘Aiming for Autonomy’. In de Rijk et al. (eds), The Dutch Design Yearbook 2012. Rotterdam: Nai 010 (pp. 45–54). Veiteberg, J. (2005) Craft in Transition. Bergen: Bergen National Academy of the Arts. 96

CHAPTER 10 CONTEMPORARY DESIGNERS, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY AND THE MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS Gareth Williams

Hitherto the connoisseur duly visited the Louvre and some subsidiary galleries, and memorized what he saw, as best he could. We, however, have far more great works available to refresh our memories than those which even the greatest of museums could bring together. For a ‘Museum Without Walls’ is coming into being, and . . . it will carry infinitely farther that revelation of the world of art, limited perforce, which the ‘real’ museums offer us within their walls. Malraux 1953:16 André Malraux’s concept of the ‘museum without walls’ (expounded in The Voices of Silence 1953) is generally understood to relate to the photographic reproduction of works of art spilling out from and beyond the confines and conventions of the museum into ‘everyday life’, and latterly it has been associated with the notion of the ‘virtual museum’. Here, I would like to re-appropriate the term to speculate about a different kind of ‘museum without walls’ where officially sanctioned works by contemporary designers take part in the public realm. Particularly, I am referring to the ways in which design and designers play roles in constructing images of national identity in sites such as world expositions (expos) and the sporting and cultural events around festivals such as the Olympics. Today, arguably, a cadre of designers exists as ‘cultural diplomats’: how has this come about? My focus is on design in the United Kingdom, but examples are international.1 A long and complex history exists between museums of art and design, world’s fairs and expos, and cultural diplomacy. For example, the origins of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (1851) and the ambitions of both to promote British design excellence are well documented. So too is the history of world exhibitions, notably by Paul Greenhalgh in Ephemeral Vistas (1988). Greenhalgh traces the origins of world’s fairs to France in the 1790s, describing fairs held in regional centres as ‘an attempt to breed popular confidence by example’ and ‘no mere trade fairs or festive celebrations, they were outward manifestations of a nation attempting to flex economic, national, military and cultural muscles’ (Greenhalgh 1988:5–6). These ambitions largely chime with our current understanding of cultural diplomacy as ‘soft power, or the ability to persuade through culture’, as defined by Joseph Nye (1990). Greenhalgh observed that ‘by 1839 the French national exhibitions had acquired an atmosphere of cultural pageantry’ and fairs were beginning to attract international as well as local attention, for example the 1844 All German Exhibition in Berlin, which ‘clearly had an eye on the foreign visitor and was intended as a showcase for German national identity’ (Greenhalgh 1988:5–6). Already, displays of manufacturers’ wares – objects of design – were regarded as possessing cultural and political agency to embody or enhance national characteristics and values, even at a time when the German states had yet to be fully unified. National ‘progress’ may be shown to be gimmicky and futuristic, for example Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the overall theme of which was ‘the world of tomorrow’. The official guidebook described his input thus: ‘known the world over as an industrial designer of distinctly serious intent, Bel Geddes here takes a vacation and turns his talents to the brighter side of life’ (Greenhalgh

97

Design Objects and the Museum

1988:43–44). Perhaps he was an unwilling cultural diplomat. Futurama was a model of the possible city of twenty years hence, dominated by motorways and vast suburbs (it was sponsored by General Motors who had a vested interest in promoting a car-dependent future). In 1939 Futurama may have seemed utopian; by 1960 it was reality; and today it could be seen as dystopian. Alternatively, progress can be presented as a titanic battle of ideologies, for example at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959, which was staged with the overt intention of destabilizing the Soviet Union by showcasing American consumerism. This was the site of the infamous ‘Kitchen Debate’ between Nixon and Khrushchev, where the relative values of capitalist and communist societies were distilled down to and represented by the appliances available for the modern kitchen. Though not authored works of design, the kitchens were nonetheless designed products acting as cultural agents. Visitors were awed but sometimes muted in their praise, and occasionally downright hostile. One visitor wrote in the comments book: ‘And this is one of the greatest nations? I feel sorry for the Americans, judging by your exhibition. Does your life really consist only of kitchens?’ (Reid 2008:160). More recent approaches to cultural diplomacy can be seen in Mark Leonard’s Demos/Design Council report BritainTM: Renewing our Identity, which sought to harness design and the other creative industries as cultural diplomats to rebrand the UK , and was delivered to Downing Street on the very first day of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure in 1997. The report advised that the key to recasting the nation’s identity should be to emphasize ‘Britain’s place as a hub, an importer and exporter of ideas, goods and services, people and cultures’ (Leonard 1997:10). The UK is indeed a centre or intersection where people exchange ideas and trade, underpinning cultural benefits with real economic gains. In addition, the report recognized and celebrated the UK ’s history as a hybrid nation and traditions of creativity and non-conformism. However, the political ambition to build huge cultural events is always doomed to failure if the content lacks meaning. Certainly this was how the critic Stephen Bayley regarded the Richard Rogers/Buro Happold Millennium Dome, one of the biggest sheds (or tents) of all, the cultural folly of New Labour and the fruit of BritainTM, which had called for the millennial celebrations to present a newly rebranded Britain to the world. Despite the contribution of major designers and architects including Nigel Coates and Zaha Hadid, the content of the Millennium Experience felt muddled and unconfident and was ultimately unmemorable. Bayley was briefly the Creative Director for the Dome before falling out with the government and remained scathingly critical of New Labour’s ambitions to rebrand Britain, regarding the Dome as nothing more than the triumph of style over substance. The Dome may be seen to represent both the zenith and nadir of design’s co-option to cultural diplomacy in recent British history. British identity seen from abroad was the focus of an exhibition curated in 2006 by English-born Andrew Bolton, curator of fashion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). Named after a term coined in the mid- to late-eighteenth century, AngloMania was an exhibition of historic garments and cutting edge British fashion since 1976, staged in the museum’s period rooms. Here, a fictional and fantasized version of British culture and history was recreated in the artificial landscape of exported fragments of British country houses. Bovver-booted punks wearing Vivienne Westwood, and suited City Boys in Paul Smith and Ozwald Boateng caroused through hunt balls and gentlemen’s clubs in a celebration of history, non-conformity and Britishness. Playing on caricatures, the exhibition nonetheless revealed truths. As Bolton pointed out, anglomania ‘is based on idealized concepts of English culture that the English themselves not only recognize, but also, in a form of “autophilia”, actively promote and perpetuate’ (Bolton 2006:13). Greenhalgh points out that the escalation of technologies, entertainment and showmanship in world’s fairs, from New York 1939 to Osaka 1970 and beyond, resulted in ‘a cosmopolitan blandness as one site gradually came to resemble another’ (Greenhalgh 1988:45). Perhaps it was just this kind of international blandness that Leonard had in mind when he called for Britain’s designers to redesign the ports of entry to the UK to provide 98

Design and Cultural Diplomacy

visitors with a stunning welcome to the country in BritainTM: Renewing our Identity. Along with international railway termini at Waterloo and St. Pancras stations, Heathrow Airport Terminal Five was ultimately the largest such exercise in re-presenting the UK ’s ports of entry and was completed with contributions by designers including Troika. The report recognized and celebrated the UK ’s history as a hybrid nation with strong traditions of creativity and non-conformism, chiming with Sebastien Noel’s ‘open, original and progressive’ values and the international identity of his studio, Troika (Williams 2012:109), a London-based multidisciplinary practice comprising Frenchman Sebastien Noel and two Germans, Eva Rucki and Conny Freyer. The studio’s five-metre long kinetic sculpture in Terminal Five, Cloud, 2008, is a good example of how corporate patronage (from, in this case, British Airways) can be channelled towards cutting-edge designers through independent bodies such as Artwise Curators who commissioned it. The commission enabled Troika to undertake the sort of ambitious and expensive project that would be impossible to undertake as a self-generated project. Cloud is design in the service of a corporate agenda as it beautifies the approach to British Airways First Class Lounge. Arguably, it is in a hybrid privatized/public space and not strictly speaking in the public realm per se. I would like to suggest that Cloud represents how design can operate in a new realm beyond the museum’s sanctified walls to fulfil the political rhetoric of BritainTM in an act of cultural diplomacy.2 With Heathrow Airport Terminal Five in mind, (and recalling Greenhalgh’s description of the ‘cosmopolitan blandness’ of world expos) I am reminded of Marc Augé’s description of airports as ‘non-places’, neutral international sites with no local specificity (Augé 1995). At Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, however, the Dutch authorities installed a temporary Rijksmuseum in the departure lounge in 2002, featuring paintings by Dutch masters from the seventeenth century: art that is emblematic of Dutch identity. The Rijksmuseum Schiphol is beyond passport control, making it accessible to transferring passengers who are not even entering the Netherlands, allowing them a glimpse of the country’s cultural heritage. It is comparable to the initiative by Philadelphia International Airport that, since 1998, has run an extensive programme of exhibitions within its terminals showcasing the city’s collections and cultural initiatives, many of which are accessible only to ticketed passengers. The Rijksmuseum Schiphol pavilion is quite literally a museum without walls because it is a glass box designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects, who later designed an extension for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. But whereas Malraux was advocating the communicative potential of art reproductions to reach broader audiences, here it is the power of the authentic individual artefact – rather than its reproduction – that is used to draw a wider audience. Evidently an example of cultural diplomacy, this is however a digression from my principal theme, which is how contemporary designers have been co-opted to this cause. Perhaps, cynically, we can regard Troika’s installations in Terminal Five, or the high culture offered by the Rijksmuseum Schiphol, as merely ornaments in Robert Venturi’s ‘decorated sheds’ (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1977). ‘Great exhibitions’ are not merely past history. The ostentation of the products shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and their excessive scale is of note (for example a bookcase shown by Carl Leistler and Son of Vienna that was almost six metres long and five metres high, now in the V&A). Greenhalgh observed: ‘The highest, biggest, newest and costliest of artefacts and structures became the commonplaces of all events, often in vulgar exercises tantamount to criminal waste’ (Greenhalgh 1988:12). He could be describing the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, the costliest ever, at which the British Pavilion alone cost £25 million. Heatherwick Studio’s Seed Cathedral can be seen to embody the same values as the displays in the Great Exhibition: massive proportions, novelty and expensive purposelessness. In contrast to Futurama, ‘progress’ may be shown to be responsible and humanitarian, demonstrating, for example, Britain’s husbandry of the world’s seed bank. 99

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 10.1 Rijksmuseum Schiphol publicity, 2014. Photograph: Gareth Williams. 100

Design and Cultural Diplomacy

Heatherwick’s design conceit was to embalm a seed bank at the end of the acrylic rods that pierced the structure, visible from within the belly of the building. The overt message may have been that ‘ecological husbandry is safe in the hands of British science’, but its real purpose was to give the UK the ‘wow factor’ on an international stage. To an extent world’s fair pavilions are ego-boosts for nations anxious to let others know they are still there and still count. This is as important for nations gaining international significance as it is for those, like the UK , whose status on the world stage is arguably in decline. In this respect the Seed Cathedral was hugely successful, visited by over seven million visitors in the six months of the expo and hosting numerous formal diplomatic functions. The pavilion was mounted on a creased podium, under which the queuing visitors were entertained and informed on their journey into the central seed bank by Troika’s installations themed around the relationship of plants and cities. Elsewhere I have published a conversation with Noel (from Troika) in which we discussed the group’s experiences in Shanghai (Williams 2012:102–109). While Troika fully appreciated that their principal task was to communicate the essence of British culture, they (perhaps surprisingly) considered this easier because of, rather than despite, not being British themselves: ‘We believe we know the country well enough to understand the nuances of its rich and wonderful culture, yet retain the necessary distance to avoid clichés and preconceptions’ (Williams 2012:109). Objectivity brings with it clarity, it appears. The patronage of cultural diplomacy like this is not dissimilar to commercial projects, according to Noel, who as we have seen had designed eye-catching public projects for clients such as British Airways. The designers needed to balance the (no doubt occasionally contradictory) political, artistic, economic, communicative and other wishes of their patrons the British Foreign Office, the architects, and an Advisory Committee, all under the watchful eyes of Chinese hosts. Noel was also acutely aware of the context of the expo, and the difficulties it presented the British Pavilion. As Greenhalgh has observed, exhibitors in world’s fairs frequently call on the latest technologies to promote progressive images of themselves. Together with Heatherwick Studio, Troika: ‘adopted a starkly non-conformist strategy. We wanted to portray the UK as innovative, open, original and progressive . . . We decided to work on creating a very peaceful and contemplative atmosphere, and relay the messages through immersive art installations’ (Williams 2012:109). The values that Noel identifies as British – innovation, openness, originality and progressiveness – constitute nothing less than a manifesto for cultural diplomacy. The Seed Cathedral existed to simultaneously entertain and educate its public, the mission statement for many modern museums too. Education and entertainment characterized the great nineteenth-century world expos, but Greenhalgh notes: ‘For most organizers, the point of an exhibition was to indicate civilization was advancing in some known direction. Especially for the host nation, the exhibition would invariably be a celebration of the past as a preparation for a better future. Therein lay the interest for government, for industry and the arts, that “things will get better” ’ (Greenhalgh 1988:23). The leitmotif of these events was the notion of ‘progress’, and what better way to embody progress than through new technologies and innovative design? Therefore it is entirely fitting that designers such as Heatherwick and Troika, who are the inventors and brokers of technologies and design ideas, should find themselves at the centre of these enterprises. Values claimed for the UK – non-conformity, individualism and hybridity among them – permeated throughout one of the most spectacular occasions of cultural diplomacy to have taken place in recent years, the opening of the London Olympics in July 2012. The modern Olympics and world’s fairs share history, traditions and values. The Olympics were revived in Athens in 1896 and the three subsequent games coincided with world’s fairs: in Paris 1900, St. Louis 1904 and alongside the Franco-British Exhibition in London 1908. Greenhalgh notes: ‘The strange combinations of carnival and ceremony, of circus and museum, of popularism and elitism which typified the Expositions Universelles therefore emerged in embryonic form at the very opening of the tradition’ (1988:5). The same could be said of the Olympics as, over time, exuberant 101

Design Objects and the Museum

stage-managed opening ceremonies have become de rigeur for host nations, and return us to the hyperbole and excess evident as early as the 1851 Great Exhibition. The opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics reputedly cost £65 million but doubts about London’s capacity to compete were groundless, as London’s £27 million ceremony was seen by a record-breaking estimated 900 million television viewers and was widely heralded as a ‘masterpiece’ and ‘a love letter to Britain’.3 Titled Isles of Wonder and directed by acclaimed film director Danny Boyle, the ceremony prominently included thousands of volunteers as well as major public figures and even a cameo from HM the Queen. Like many world’s fairs, the ceremony stressed economic, social and political progress, and not inconsequentially emphasized the UK ’s contribution to global advances. The narrative presented the creation of modern British national identity, from William Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’ and ‘dark Satanic Mills’, to the creation of the welfare state, the World Wide Web and Britain’s contribution to contemporary popular culture. It blended comedy with sentiment, nostalgia with utopianism, and modesty with shame-faced self-promotion. In stark contrast to the conventional choreographed spectaculars typified by the Beijing ceremony, in which individuals are subjugated to the effect only achievable by massed, anonymous crowds, Isles of Wonder appeared to be populated by many, many individuals and personal narratives. The quirkiness, even awkwardness and contrariness of Britons was celebrated; for example, the comedic character Mr Bean and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Knowing that many of the performers were ‘real people’ only intensified the sensation of inclusiveness and diversity: values of merit to British cultural diplomacy. One sequence celebrated British popular music, and Royal College of Art (RCA ) student Mauricio Affonso took part. A Brazilian-Canadian designer travelling on an Italian passport, he depicted David Bowie,

Figure 10.2 Mauricio Affonso taking part in the Opening Ceremony, London 2012 Olympic Games, 2012. Photograph: Courtesy of Mauricio Affonso.

102

Design and Cultural Diplomacy

a British rock star, who in turn was depicting Ziggy Stardust, a space alien: a combination that sums up the melting pot that is both Britain, and British design. The opening ceremony was truly a triumph of substance and style, and British designers contributed to all aspects of the successful communication and operation of the games. Heatherwick’s cauldron was quite literally assembled from the contributions of the participating nations, as it was made up of individual ‘petals’ bourn by representatives of each national team, and embodied both Olympic and British values of inclusiveness and equality. Barber and Osgerby’s torch was symbolically decorated with motifs drawn from Olympic rhetoric: the pierced surface evoked an abstraction of the Olympic rings, while the 8,000 holes represented each of the torchbearers in the relay. Its triangulated structure was inspired by the three Olympic values of ‘Friendship, Respect and Excellence’ and the Olympic motto ‘Higher, Faster, Stronger’, as well as the three occasions London has hosted the event in 1908, 1948 and 2012. RCA students designed both the medal podiums and the attendants’ uniforms. Stella McCartney’s designs for Team GB sportswear deconstructed the Union Jack so each athlete wore a fragment of the national flag, contributing to the completeness of the team as a whole, and the invitation to regard the team as a microcosm of the nation. There is much interesting further work to be done studying the selection and procurement of design for the event. The 2012 London Olympics, and the opening ceremony in particular, can be said to have reinforced not only the UK ’s self-image as a creative, modern liberal democracy but also the rest of the world’s love affair with these values and with Britain. It was nothing less than anglomania, a foreigners’ passion for British values, in part given shape and expression by designers. Neither international trade in goods nor nationalism were born in the nineteenth century, but the world’s fairs that originated and flourished then created contexts where design and cultural diplomacy could flourish together. These were state sanctified occasions, even though they may have been enacted by private enterprise, in much the same way as the commissions of LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) or British Airways place works of design before the public gaze to represent national values. World’s fairs became associated with hyperbole, spectacle, entertainment and education, and were imbued with a belief in progress, often embodied by technology. Those values are the same today and informed how we can read the cultural diplomacy of the Shanghai World Expo. As Britain moved from Conservative to New Labour rule in 1997, the new regime hitched itself to design and the creative industries – to ‘Cool Britannia’ – in a bid to signal progress towards a rebranded UK , with mixed results. But the period consolidated both British national identity and designers around similar traits of non-conformity, innovation, hybridity and individualism. The successful cultural ambassadors are those designers whose work encapsulates those values without neglecting British heritage, like those fashion designers shown in AngloMania; designers who are capable of simultaneously working within the establishment and outside it. Together, their work forms a diverse body of design that can be seen as a ‘museum without walls’, persuading through culture (Nye 1990) and existing for the public in the public realm. Notes 1. This chapter builds upon previous research into the public roles played by contemporary designers in which I examined how design operates as an agent of cultural diplomacy. 2. For a much fuller exploration of the strategies used by British politicians to exploit design for the purposes of cultural diplomacy since the 1990s, see 21 Designers for Twenty-first Century Britain: Design as Cultural Diplomacy (Williams 2012:8–27). 3. Media reaction to London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19025686 (Accessed 6 August 2014).

103

Design Objects and the Museum

References Augé, M. ([1992]1995) Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992. Trans Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Bolton, A. (2006) AngloMania, Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Greenhalgh, P. (1988) Ephemeral Vistas; the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leonard, M. (1997) BritainTM: Renewing Our Identity. London: Demos. London Olympics Opening Ceremony, BBC News. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19025686 (Accessed 6 August 2014). Malraux, A. ([1953]1978) The Voices of Silence. Trans by Stuart Gilbert. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nye, J. (1990) Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books. Reid, S. E. (2008) ‘ “Our Kitchen is Just as Good”: Soviet Responses to the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959’. In Crowley, D. and Pavitt, J. (eds), Cold War Modern, Design 1945–1970. London: V&A Publishing (pp. 154–161). Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D. and Izenour, S. (1977) Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Williams, G. (2012) 21 Twenty-one, 21 Designers for Twenty-first Century Britain. London: V&A Publishing.

104

CHAPTER 11 CURATING CRITICAL DESIGN: AN EMBODIED CRITICALITY Gillian Russell

In the face of recent critical design exhibitions, an air of new potentiality weaves its way through shifting conceptions of design practice. This comes at a time marked by momentous changes in the field of product design, the result not only of different modes of critical forms and structures written into a new vocabulary of practice but also of increasing interest in museums to include design as a theme. Here under the umbrella of a shifting landscape around design and its mediation within the museum I would like to examine Risk Centre, Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, 2013, and to invoke theorist and curator Irit Rogoff ’s notion of embodied criticality as a model through which to better understand the methodologies that are framing the curatorial propositions within this emerging form of design practice.

Critical design It is my effort to understand the work of critical practice as a vehicle for emancipatory change, for thinking, provoking, inspiring and offering new potentials for our world. Since its inception in the early 1990s, critical formats, interpretive modes of inquiry, ideology and social emancipation have become pervasive features of this new genre of design practice. As a form of social research through design, critical design foregrounds the ethics of design while bringing to light the values, ideologies, and behavioural norms etched into the workings of conventional product design practice (Dunne 2006; Dunne and Raby 2001). As critical design’s outcomes are knowledge-based, not product-oriented, its purpose is, as designer and educator Anthony Dunne states, ‘to seduce the viewer into a world of ideas rather than objects’ (2006:147). At its most basic it is a practice intended to give prominence to locating, revealing and articulating problems, rather than succumbing to design’s Industrial Age logic of progress, problem-solving, market consumption and economies of scale (Branzi 1984; Garcia-Anton, King and Brandle 2007; Sparke 1988; Mazé 2011). The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites, for example, which took place in 2009, uses the language of design as a mode of critique where problems are revealed and made available for interaction and engagement. Inspired by the Douglas Adams quote: ‘Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it’ (Adams 1992), Thwaites set out to make an electric toaster from scratch (Thwaites 2011). By extracting raw materials and processing them himself he attempted to replicate a mass-produced run-of-the-mill toaster available at UK high street retailer Argos, retailing at £3.94. What makes the project so valuable is what it reveals through the careful documentation of its coming into being. Notably, The Toaster Project aimed not to deliver a concrete proposal or optimal solution, but rather a provocation for reflection and debate. Its value exists not through its potential to toast bread but instead through its ability to call attention to the imperfections of our prevailing norms, to unveil truths about the complexities of the modern world, the material and practical origins concealed within the everyday objects that surround us, and the hidden costs embodied within the commodification and disposability of modernism’s culture of consumption. In short, as a domain of practice critical design provides designers and their publics with a broad discursive space in which to reflect on the world of design and the social, cultural and economic realities embedded in

105

Design Objects and the Museum

its networks. Here, the shift to a critical practice may be construed as a genuine query being made by designers on the role of design in society, and the larger socio-political and institutional contexts in which designers operate. This is not simply to propose that designers have taken a turn on their own practice but rather to assert that design practice has opened itself up to the working methods of critical thought – offering alternatives that seek to both explain and transform society. Critical design in this sense is focused on facilitating research and experimentation, reflexivity, speculation and debate. In other words, it seeks not to fulfil the status quo but rather to enlist scepticism, questioning, ambiguity and enquiry as primary modes of practice. Moreover, it explores the existence of alternative design values that operate outside global capital while encouraging more critical attitudes in designers and their publics. This ‘break’ from design’s historical narratives has put pressure on the conventional modes of design production and consumption under our current capitalist system. Instead of supplying the market with commodities, this new breed of design situates itself in a politicized space aimed at the imagination. This emphasis on the social over the material offers many challenges for the field, not least of which relates to matters of context and mediation and the translation between object and user. In fact one might argue that the essence of projects such as Thwaites’ lies in their dissemination and engagement; the publication of the project as a trade paperback guaranteed that it reached a much wider audience than the initial research at the Royal College of Art. As Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby assert: ‘they are designed to circulate’ (Dunne and Raby 2013:139). Indeed an argument can be made that designs such as The Toaster Project beg a new context that goes beyond the market and domestic environments. It is this context that becomes essential for fostering the true potential of this form of critical design, raising issues relating to situated interpretations and conceptualization. Dunne and Raby suggest the exhibition as an ideal context to consider. ‘The exhibition and, in particular, museum exhibitions,’ they write, ‘are ideal places to explore and enrich our “self-understanding”. We can build on existing conceptions of what exhibitions are and how they work to develop new approaches and presentation formats’ (2013:154). Following Dunne and Raby, this chapter will explore the argument that the museum can be a fruitful space in which to examine critical design’s relevance to society. However, unlike much of museum practice today, bound to the systems of representation and objectification and the assumption of immanent meanings that can be exposed and explained, the new unity between critical design and the museum, I will argue, would be a site of potentiality, a model of resistance rather than ritual. In recent histories of curating critical design we see various communicative situations being formed that depart from the notion of a temple of humanistic relics connecting instead with ideas of flexibility, criticality and experimentation. This turn away from direct intentions and exemplifications is reframing the museum exhibition as a context for new forms of encounter. The following will contribute insights into the diverse and contingent curatorial practices involved in communicating and disseminating critical design practice. The central aim is to uncover a legibility for design’s expandedness (referring to Rosalind Krauss’s (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’); to search for ways in which critical design can be made effective as experience in a culture that habitually associates design with materiality. This chapter goes beyond communicating and disseminating this burgeoning form of design practice – examining strategies that actively engage with the behaviours of critical works – to uncover what John Roberts defines as the facticity and ideological density that allows a particular form of praxis to bring recipients into its purview (Roberts 2013). Thus legibility in these terms implies that critical design needs to find points of connection, that is access and participation, if it is to find a place in the world. This search for an identity ultimately raises questions of the situatedness and relationality of this expanded field of design practice. Which contexts and conditions make critical design viable? Where is it best performed and served? Who is it for? And ultimately, how can it engage with a user embedded in a world where design is fundamentally understood to be devoted to progress and problem-solving, mass-manufacture, performance 106

Curating Critical Design

and aesthetics? Criticality and embodied criticality, as defined by Rogoff (2006), offers a powerful model through which to conceive and materialize the relationship between critical design and the museum exhibition. In her essay titled ‘Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality’, Rogoff embarks on a discussion of experiencing contemporary cultural practices as a form of embodiment that reflects a mode of practice that inhabits a work. It is a living-out situation, where meaning is not a pre-determined element of a work but instead generated through a performative function that takes place in the present. Rogoff sees this as intimately tied to society’s shift away from critique towards criticality: That is that we have moved from criticism which is a form of finding fault and of exercising judgement according to a consensus of values, to critique which is examining the underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing logic, to criticality which is operating from an uncertain ground of actual embeddedness. By this I mean that criticality while building on critique wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames (2006:2). For Rogoff, the notion of criticality is in itself a mode of embodiment, a ‘living through’ the very problem we are trying to analyse and apprehend. It represents an abiding unity between audience and work as it enters a discourse of performativity that actively inhabits a subject rather than merely offering it for analysis and consumption. This emphasis on possibility and potentiality, in which works can be approached as relative not absolute truths, offers a space for multiple viewpoints and experiences that together create a collective endeavour that remains open to contestation and adjustment. This notion of embodied criticality brings into perspective an understanding of the audience as a central component to critical practice. It positions the subject in a leading role, in the sense indicated by Filiberto Menna, whereby the individual is moved towards a state of self-realization and the full exercise of freedom (Menna 1972). Or, as Rogoff argues: ‘Criticality as I perceive it is precisely in the operations of recognizing the limitations of one’s thought for one does not learn something new until one unlearns something old, otherwise one is simply adding information rather than rethinking a structure’ (2003:1). This is particularly intriguing when we consider that works of critical design are frequently concerned with marking out a space for social emancipation, dialogue and cultural exchange. Taken in the context of his own work Dunne argues that works of critical design ‘probe our beliefs and values, challenge our assumptions and encourage us to imagine how what we call “reality” could be different. They help us see that the way things are now is just one possibility, and not necessarily the best one’ (Dunne and Raby 2009:ii). Similarly in their article ‘What is “Critical” about Critical Design?’, Bardzell and Bardzell consider critical design as a ‘research strategy dedicated to transgressing the undermining social conformity, passivity, and similar values of capitalist ideology, in hopes of bringing about social emancipation’ (2013). They further identify a series of key characteristics of critical design including: ‘suspicions of the potential for hidden ideologies’, ‘cultivation of critical awareness’, and ‘conditions of democratic participation’. If design’s embodiment as critical practice is, as the above suggests, bound to notions of self-reflection and social emancipation then it would follow that what we see today is a new form of design that demands a more discursive relationship to its users than the existing market can provide. By extension its primary mode of reception is not as a functional object for users to consume, but instead as a tool to engage its public in questioning, debate and discovery. What I am attempting to uncover is a move away from the static relationship between object and audience established in the traditional museum; considering instead the museum exhibition as a live medium, approached as a model of emergence that generates active engagement with critical design practice rather than merely offering it for aesthetic consumption. The emphasis here is on the creation of conditions for both 107

Design Objects and the Museum

thinking and doing, whereby the exhibition privileges an embodied criticality within which the viewer is asked to emancipate and to question his/her knowledge and modes of inhabiting the world. The exhibition here is conceived as a heuristic space open for active experience and encounter, a performative concept where the viewer is conceptualized as a constituent of the work. In this instance what comes to the fore is that a notion of embodied criticality is not only an integral element to understanding critical design as a mode of practice, but an operational device for its exhibition in the museum.

Exhibition as embodied criticality It might prove easiest to engage this idea of a practice that privileges engagement, possibility and social emancipation through a project that reveals this mode of embodied criticality within the realm of critical design and the museum exhibition: Risk Centre (2013) by British designer Onkar Kular with architect Inigo Minns. Since the early 2000s Kular’s work has regularly employed design as a tool to engage with and question contemporary social and cultural issues and has often culminated in a combination of objects, environments and storytelling mediated through both exhibition and performance (Kular, Minns and Ericson 2013:32). Directed towards open questions and engagement, Kular’s research-orientated works centre on collectively

Figure 11.1 Building Site and Road, Risk Centre, Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, 2013, courtesy of Onkar Kular & Matti Östling.

108

Curating Critical Design

Figure 11.2 Internet Café and Town Square, Risk Centre, Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm, 2013, courtesy of Onkar Kular & Matti Östling.

produced situations where the audience is approached as co-author. Risk Centre, a project that grew from a string of research commissions and residencies exploring public and domestic risk and educational safety, fundamentally posed the question; what is Risk? Curated by Margnus Ericson and exhibited at Arkitekturmuseet (Stockholm’s architecture museum) the project re-programmed the Museum into a site-specific risk assessment facility replete with mocked up street scenes, a building site, Internet café, private residence, lake front and public square, which together represented a micro-environment of Stockholm City. While acting as a venue for a public engagement programme centred on risk and safety education, Risk Centre invited visitors to explore and engage with the many ways risk is identified, evaluated, communicated and governed. The project comprised a stream of theatrical interventions framed by open questions, prompts and exercises that were further supported by an events and workshop programme peopled by actors facilitating visitor engagement. Passing seamlessly through the expansive settings visitors were faced with a wittingly banal world littered with hidden hazards: a kite caught in the electric wires of a utility pole; an ashtray near soft furnishings; a dark passage; a bridge; a staircase; a pedestrian crossing. Moreover, amidst the strangely familiar settings sat a handful of clandestine ‘easter eggs’ that further elucidated questions of an ‘economy’ of fear. For example, discreetly positioned amongst the general clutter in the living room were both a peach and a hammer, in reference to ‘You can’t argue with a car’ (1976), a short film about road safety, and Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, a book by Ulrich Beck (1992) that expands the traditional concept of risk to include the social experience. In an interview for the catalogue Kular observed: 109

Design Objects and the Museum

Evaluation of risk, at many scales, is a common thing to do within our everyday lives, and according to some theories, is a critical part of our development from childhood into adulthood. Many disciplines, such as; finance, healthcare, design and education; formalise this process with specific practices and activities . . . that educate the public towards avoiding risks; effectively institutionalising, and ultimately formalising, what might otherwise be practiced as ‘common sense’ (Kular et al. 2013:36). Through an intimate exploration into the themes of ‘right to play’, ‘privacy and safety on the internet’, ‘risk in the everyday’, ‘traffic and the public realm’ and ‘being a junior citizen’, Risk Centre mimicked this system of preventative thought while orchestrating the visitor into an exploration of the invisible, taken-for-granted actuality of risk in the everyday. It is important to recognize however, that Kular and Minns’ critical design work aimed neither to support notions of the economy of fear nor to deconstruct it. Instead, it created situations left open to investigation, interpretation and questioning, and invited the visitor to participate productively. This becomes most evident in the accompanying exhibition booklet, which included ten scripted scenarios relevant to the individual environments within Risk Centre. ‘What Is In The Bag?’ was a scene in the exhibition, in which visitors were asked to play out different scenarios of what they believed could be in an unidentified black bag left on the road. From questioning the contents to imagining the consequences, visitors were encouraged to contemplate their role in navigating the landscape of risk that surrounded them. As a form of introduction to the scenario, a footnoted framing story accompanied the script, further involving the audience in the reality of our culture of fear: Unidentified Bag At 4pm on Tuesday 6th November 2012, a passenger discovered an unattended bag in the Arrivals area of Dabolim Airport, Goa, India. Chaos ensued, with Airport staff and Security unsure of what to do with the unidentified bag. There followed an agonising two hours of speculation on the contents of the bag before the Bomb Disposal Squad arrived. Inside the bag they found a freshly baked cake (Kular and Minns 2013:6). While employed as triggers intended to stimulate speculation, reflection and debate, each intervention was designed to enliven the audience and create an active and physically engaged moment collapsing the spectator/ performer division. This emphasis on participatory performance sought to engage the visitor in the very idea of risk and its social visibility through tactics of negotiation, relationally and collaboration. Risk Centre was therefore more of an action than an exhibition – an active engagement with the individual and their notion of the psychological and physical realities of risk. Its very nature implied that the audience should uncover a continuity between the work of design and their lives. In this sense the object of the work formed only the negotiable framework for the event of participation. And only through the actions and interactions of object, scenario, actor and visitor did the meaning of the work emerge. In this staging, risk was never represented but instead evoked in the visitor’s physical and reflective experiences of the work. What is significant is that within the institutional setting of the museum, agency was handed over to the visitor, inciting experimentation and initiative, while maintaining emancipatory potential. According to this logic, the exhibition acted as a polyphonic working space positioning Risk Centre as a mode of embodiment – a criticality of risk. As Kular observes: A key to speculative design is that it is open ended; where the final result is not fully anticipated by the designer, but is seen as the response given by the user or audience. This attitude creates a shift in the landscape of design; where the Customer can become the Audience, and the end user is, in fact, also 110

Curating Critical Design

Collaborator. This shift then ripples out into the way in which work is produced, and the form of the institution that houses it. In particular, the museum and gallery working in this context may no longer function simply to display artefacts and objects, but become active agents in the research and exploration of the theme (Kular et al. 2013:50–51). As such, the work acted contrary to the established stock of museum atmospheres and pedagogies. If the traditional museum was predicated on authority, discipline, grand narratives and totalizing theory (Bennett 1995), then the introduction of active spaces of negotiation and collaboration between the institution, design and its public is a clear indication of the project’s approach to the institution as a live medium rather than simply a spatial exercise. In other words, this move away from the ‘culture of persuasion’ produced not only the highly complex research structure of Risk Centre, but ultimately shifted the very notion of exhibition making into a mode of embodied criticality.

Conclusion By disrupting and destroying existing assumptions, projects such as Risk Centre allow us to access a different mode of inhabitation with the museum. That is, they move us from an understanding of the museum as a ‘closed space’ to an open platform that encourages a living-out of the very subject concerned. This move away from direct intentions and exemplifications invites us to consider a curatorial gesture able to actively engage with its subject matter; a gesture driven by the desire to facilitate everything from research to experimentation, dialogue to discourse. What emerges from the above discussion is that critical design demands a search for new approaches and criteria for communicating and disseminating its works. Increasingly the museum exhibition might be the context in which we are able to attend to critical design’s legibility in a way that moves its audience towards a state of self-realization. What is needed is the establishment of new conceptual and methodological bridges between critical design, the museum exhibition, and its audience. It is here, I would argue, that a shift to a modality of lived experience offers, as Rogoff contends: ‘an opportunity to “unbound” the work from all of those categories and practices that limit its ability to explore that which we do not yet know or that which is not yet a subject in the world’ (2006:3). Importantly, then, the example of Risk Centre is pivotal when considering how exhibition formats can accommodate the changing nature of critical design practice, and how criticality can be embedded in exhibition practices as a mode of legibility that moves the visitor towards a state of social emancipation.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors: Hilary French (RCA ), Gareth Williams (RCA ), Jana Scholze (V&A) and Louise Shannon (V&A). I would also like to thank the AHRC for their generous support of my research.

References Adams, D. (1992) Mostly Harmless. London: Pan. Bardzell, J. and Bardzell, S. (2013) ‘What is “Critical” about Critical Design?’ CHI’13 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM (pp. 3297–3306).

111

Design Objects and the Museum Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans by Mark Ritter. London: SAGE . Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Branzi, A. (1984) The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Dunne, A. (2006) Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2001) Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser. Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2009) Introduction to What If . . . Future Form, Future Function? Dublin: Dublin Science Gallery (pp. i–ii). Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative Everything: Design Fiction and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Dunne, A. and Raby, F. ‘Critical Design FAQ’. Available online: http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/bydandr/13/0 (Accessed 13 April 2013). Garcia-Anton, K., King, E. and Brandle, C. (eds) (2007) Wouldn’t it Be Nice . . . Wishful Thinking in Art and Design. Geneva: Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve. Krauss, R. (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, 8, 30–44. Kular, O. ‘Risk Centre’. Available online: http:www.onkarkular.com/index.php?/project/risk-centre/ (Accessed 2 April 2013). Kular, O. and Minns, I. (2013) Risk Centre Guidance Script. Sweden: Arkitekturmuseet. Kular, O., Minns, I. and Ericson, M. (2013) Risk Centre Catalogue. Sweden: Arkitekturmuseet. Mazé, R. (2011) ‘Critical of What?’ Design Research Network. Available online: http://www.designresearchnetwork.org/ drn/content/feature-discussion-session-1%3A-critical-what%3F (Accessed 20 December 2013). Menna, F. (1972) ‘A Design for New Behaviors’. In Ambasz, E. (ed.), Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. New York: The Museum of Modern Art (pp. 405–415). Roberts, J. (2013) ‘Art and Praxis: Metastability, Legibility, Situatedness’. Psychopathologies of Congnitive Captialism, 2. Available online: http://www.artbrain.org/john-roberts-art-and-praxis-metastability-legibility-situatedness/ (Accessed 5 January 2014). Rogoff, I. (2003) ‘From Criticism to Critique to Criticality’. EIPCP. Available online: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/ rogoff1/en (Accessed 15 February 2014). Rogoff, I. (2006) ‘Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality’. EIPCP. Available online: http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoffsmuggling (Accessed 10 February 2014). Sparke, P. (1988) Design in Italy: 1870 To the Present. London: Thames and Hudson. The National Archives. Peach And Hammer. Available online: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1964to1979/filmpage_ hammer.htm (Accessed 22 June 2015). Thwaites, T. (2011) The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

112

PART III INTERPRETATION AND THE CHALLENGE OF DESIGN

113

114

CHAPTER 12 DESIGN, POLITICS AND MUSEUM PRESENTATION Marianne Lamonaca

Museums have long played an important role in giving meaning to works of art and design. The aim of this essay is to offer insights gained from my experiences curating exhibitions with a broad range of designed objects and artworks that are political in nature at the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach, Florida.1 Presenting materials with overt political agendas created opportunities to engage audiences to view design through a variety of lenses, from aesthetics and function to political intent. Some of the questions I confronted are: How does the museum’s mission and its perceived audience impact the overall presentation? What is the museum’s responsibility when presenting design created with political motivations? Do the conventions that guide museum display highlight or obscure important aspects of the relationship between design and politics? What kind of information or interpretation should accompany such objects? The Wolfsonian is a museum and research centre with the mission to exhibit, document and preserve the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, ‘a vast assemblage of objects that includes furniture, paintings, books, prints, industrial and decorative art objects, and ephemera’.2 At the time I joined The Wolfsonian in 1993 its programme was still in formation and the collection was estimated to comprise about 50,000 objects amassed solely by its founder Mitchell (Micky) Wolfson Jr. (b. 1939), the son of a prominent Miami Beach businessman and former mayor of Miami Beach. Wolfson has used objects to make sense of the world and his place in it, and his collecting practices have shaped the museum and its programme. In the early 1980s Wolfson’s collection found a home at Miami-Dade Community College’s New World Campus. Grace Glueck, writing for the New York Times, summed up the collection as ‘a heady mix of beautiful objects, and downright junk’ (Glueck 1984:H27). Glueck uses the word ‘propaganda’ only twice in this 1984 review, as a reference to the proper name of the collection3 and in a statement attributed to Wolfson: ‘It’s the result of 20 years of tracking by the younger Mr. Wolfson, who credits his interest in both design and “propaganda” to a dual educational background in art history and political science’ (Glueck 1984:H27). More puzzling is that Glueck mentions ‘American, English and Italian design and decorative arts, from 1885 to 1945’ and leaves out Germany, one of the richest areas of the collection. Exhibitions drawn from Wolfson’s collection at Miami-Dade Community College offered visitors a wide range of objects organized under themes, such as Italy: 1900–1945 (1984) and Style of Empire: Great Britain, 1877–1947. Broad in scope, these early projects favoured quantity over quality, and object-based research and interpretation were generally limited. When Glueck returned to The Wolfsonian a few years later, she found a more mature organization, and one poised to inhabit a building of its own in Miami Beach.4 In ‘Omnivore of All Kinds of Objects’ she noted, ‘The collection contains some of the finest examples of “propaganda” materials, including Fascist and Nazi items. But Mr. Wolfson’s broad view of the term includes promotional and advertising arts and the products of mass manufacturing’ (Glueck 1989:C1). The change in her description of the collection was due, in part, to the formalizing of the programme to present Wolfson’s collection at a museum of its own under the direction and care of museum professionals. Wolfson understood that the collection would ‘have to be shaped for public presentation’ (Glueck 1989:C6). A rigorous museological programme was established and, together with the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Wolfson’s enterprise was slowly re-shaped from one man’s hoard to the locus of serious scholarship on the material culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

115

Design Objects and the Museum

centuries in Europe and America. Although many writers, including myself, use the word ‘museum’ to describe the Wolfsonian, it should be noted that Mr Wolfson was opposed to the use of the word and insisted that the official name omit it.5

Politics and design: case studies In 1995, the Wolfsonian opened to the public with its inaugural exhibition, The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945. The conceptual framework of the exhibition asserted that the objects on view were shaped by or reflected societal changes brought about by modernity, from the reform movements of the latenineteenth century to the ‘persuasive’ or propagandistic designs of the interwar period. More than 200 objects were organized into three large groupings: Confronting Modernity, Celebrating Modernity and Manipulating Modernity: Political Persuasion. Attributes such as object type, designer/maker, medium, technique or national origin were subordinated to the meta-narrative of modernity, and the organization of the works was based on the rejection or embrace of modernity. The goal was to explore ‘the conscious intent with which objects are created – the messages of objects – and how design contributed to the perception of the modern world’ (Kaplan 1995b). In Confronting Modernity, the first section of the show, the political nature of the objects primarily rested on the concept of national identity. Among the works on view were: book bindings made in the 1890s by artists in Amsterdam using the characteristic batik dying technique appropriated from the Dutch Indonesian colonies; a traditional ryijy carpet designed by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in 1904 that affirmed a return to native craft traditions in a country long dominated by Sweden; and an architectural rendering from the late 1930s for a proposed Museum of Hungarian Folk Art that featured stained glass windows with folkloric motifs; exhibits that reinforced designers’ responses to changing political, cultural, technological and economic realities. The glazed ceramic casket by Della Robbia Pottery made for Queen Victoria in 1897 proclaiming, ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’, was arguably the most overtly political object in this section. Presented as a gift to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee celebrating sixty years of her reign, its iconography relayed British history and the Queen’s empire: on the lid is a sculptural representation of St. George slaying a dragon and on the sides of the vessel are sailing ships and banners with the names of British territories. From the examples presented here, and throughout the rest of the exhibition, the curatorial strategy was to show that designers make choices about materials, production techniques and formal qualities that express aspects of the context in which the works are conceived and made. To emphasize the design process the objects varied in their national origin, date of production and typology. The display invited viewers to explore how aesthetics, the usual domain of art museums, are embedded in our cultural values, which in turn are bound to the political and economic realities of an era. Celebrating Modernity, the central section of the show, comprised objects that expressed how designers embraced new materials, aesthetics and new production techniques that shaped the modern era. The characteristics of lightness and transparency that defined the new glass and metal architecture of the International Style, for example, could also be seen in Mies van der Rohe’s MR 20 chair in tubular steel. Peter Müller-Munk’s Normandie pitcher captured the streamlined form of an ocean liner. In many ways, this section of the exhibition was the least encumbered by politics, yet there were several important examples, such as the works of Amsterdam School architects and designers of the 1910s to 1920s that were shaped by socialist ideals, and the poster of working-class housing complexes in ‘Red Vienna’. The sculpture Profilo continuo del Duce (Continuous Profile of the Duce) by Renato Bertelli demonstrated how the Futurist concept of simultaneity 116

Design, Politics and Museum Presentation

Figure 12.1 Presentation casket to Queen Victoria for the Diamond Jubilee, 1897; Gwendoline Buckler, Della Robbia Pottery Ltd., Birkenhead, England, Lead-glazed earthenware (55.2 × 46.0 cm dia), The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection, TD 1989.49.3 a,b. Photo: Bruce White. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida).

117

Design Objects and the Museum

influenced the creation of this ultra-modern portrait of Italy’s leader Benito Mussolini, at once abstract and machine-like and eerily representational. The most overtly political, and perhaps the most challenging section of the exhibition was Manipulating Modernity: Political Persuasion. Many of the objects were displayed so that the viewer could make a visual analysis of the imagery. The image of an eagle, for example, was used within three different political systems to convey related, but different, meanings. Three works were exhibited alongside each other: an Italian flag with an eagle clasping fasces; a metal insignia of an eagle clasping a swastika in its talons; and a poster with an eagle clasping a gear in one talon and bolts of lightning in the other for the United States National Recovery Administration. The juxtaposition invited the audience to consider the meaning of the eagle as a symbol or logotype. While some context was provided, the intention was never to explain the historical background for each work. The curatorial emphasis was on the object – what it looked like, when it was made, who commissioned it – and not on the history of National Socialism or the New Deal.6 Design historian Victor Margolin took exception to this type of comparison in his review of an essay in the exhibition’s catalogue. He wrote: While there is surely something to be gained by drawing attention to similar images in different cultures, the attempt to draw political parallels between the images may be misleading. Reilly compares a poster by the Italian artist Marcello Dudovich, a calendar page for the Racial Policy Office of the Nazi Party by Ludwig Hohlwein, and the study for an American post office mural by Frank Shapiro in order to illustrate his observation that all three regimes were concerned with the cohesion of the family. While this may be so, the ideological reasons for promoting the family were sufficiently different in each country as to raise questions about the value of comparing them. Had Reilly focused on issues of rhetoric rather than iconography, he might have better used the imagery to explain how each government constructed different arguments for its particular agenda with images that might otherwise appear similar (Margolin 1997:81).7 When the New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp reviewed The Wolfsonian’s inaugural exhibition, he titled his piece, ‘Well-Made Surfaces and the Conflicts Lurking Beneath Them’. Both Muschamp and Margolin provided important insights and affirmation about the Wolfsonian enterprise. Muschamp understood the exhibition’s intent when he wrote: ‘Here, the designed object is considered not just a work of visual art but a medium of communication, an instrument more powerful in its own way than a written manifesto. A manifesto, after all, is merely a declaration of intentions. A designed interior can create the illusion that the reconstruction of reality is already under way’ (Muschamp 1995:H38). Recognizing that even the most mundane objects told chilling stories, Muschamp referred to ‘the most diabolical object in the show . . . a sweet pair of china figurines depicting Hitler youths’. These pure white porcelain figures were made in 1937 at a factory in Dachau staffed by concentration camp prisoners. Included in a section that examined propaganda directed towards youth and families, the figurines, together with other objects such as ‘La Conquista d’Abissinia’, a board game produced in Italy after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, aimed to contribute to political and social unity. The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945 intended to demonstrate ‘the reciprocal relationship between rhetoric and political policy on the one hand, and the design, production and consumption of objects on the other’ (The Wolfsonian Bulletin 1993:6). The curatorial emphasis on the designed object may seem self-evident, especially in relationship to The Wolfsonian with its rich and varied collection. Yet the challenge has been to keep the focus on the agency of the objects themselves, and not to use objects as mere illustrations of historical events or abstract concepts. How do we deliver the information that is needed to make meaning within a 118

Design, Politics and Museum Presentation

Figure 12.2 Figurine, Hitler Jugend Trommler [Hitler Youth Drummer], c. 1937; Glazed porcelain (26.7 × 14.6 × 10.2 cm), 85.7.274.1. with Figurine, Bund Deutscher Mädel [League of German Girls], c. 1937; Glazed porcelain (30.8 × 8.9 × 8.9 cm), 85.7.274.2.; Richard Förster, Porzellan Manufaktur Allach, Allach and Dachau, Germany; The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection. Photo: Bruce White. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida). 119

Design Objects and the Museum

museum setting? How do we get viewers to look beyond the surface? And how do we address Margolin’s critique that it is the ‘rhetorical’ rather than the iconographic that must be understood? While mining the Wolfsonian Collection over the course of nearly twenty years, a set of strategies developed for the display and interpretation of designed objects. At the beginning it was important to expose the breadth of the collection, and early exhibitions focused on some of its core strengths such as the British Arts and Crafts Movement, graphic design and public works of art. The Wolfsonian consciously privileges the political context when interpreting objects, in part because the political context informed Wolfson’s selection criteria. Many objects in the collection easily fit under the large umbrella of design with a political agenda, but not all of them would be considered overt propaganda. The core concept of The Wolfsonian’s mission is ‘the persuasive power of art and design’.8 Visitors are encouraged to explore how people turn their intentions and ideas into concrete forms through design – objects, images, clothing, buildings and environments. Using a variety of interpretative techniques the overarching strategy is to model ways for audiences to engage with objects. Educating visitors about the role that design plays in everyday life informs all of the interpretation. The focus is to convey these design principles: design has agency, design is shaped by the context of its creation, and design impacts behaviour, and therefore has historical consequences. Muschamp’s observation about The Wolfsonian’s inaugural exhibition applies to the museum’s mission as a whole. He wrote: [O]ne leaves the show with hope that this museum will persuade visitors to look more critically at the arts of persuasion that bombard us today. Whether it’s the canned applause surrounding the Internet or the erotic jamboree of Calvin Klein ads, the images of the consumer culture can be better understood in the context of the era that invented hype (Muschamp 1995:H38). Object interpretation rests on careful artefact analysis and research in order to provide audiences with basic information about an object: What is it? Who made it? When was it made? What is it made of? Depending on the nature of the display or exhibition some additional information may be provided about the political and economic context, how it was marketed and consumed, or perhaps its effects on a culture or on the environment. The display strategies used also help to reinforce meaning. An object may be shown in comparison with or in contrast to another, or placed within a group of similar or different objects, or it may be set off on its own to reinforce an object’s unique characteristics. Combining the various modes of display raises the possibility that objects are not fixed in one interpretive model, and are open to varied interpretations by the viewer. Many of The Wolfsonian’s permanent gallery displays and exhibitions have touched upon political aspects of design, from the most overt such as Public Works (1998), Print, Power and Persuasion: German Graphic Design, 1890–1945 (2001) and Weapons of Mass Dissemination: The Propaganda of War (2003) to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (2011). Each exhibition started with the discovery and exploration of objects, and the objective of offering visitors new ways of looking at them in order to facilitate a heightened awareness of and interest in design. Since the collection has a fixed historical time frame, a critical concern was to provide interpretation about the design of the object with enough historical context for the work to be understood. A grille from the German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, for example, was displayed among other public works of art and its interpretation focused on the government’s desire to create a cohesive architectural programme to represent Germany at the height of National Socialism and within the international setting of a world’s fair. The grille is composed of an interlocking pattern of swastikas. Throughout the German Pavilion the swastika was used as an ornamental element. In the label accompanying the grille the swastika was discussed as a symbol with ancient roots, which is found in many cultures and represents prosperity, wellbeing and good fortune. This compelling object brings into focus how a symbol, used repetitively and within 120

Design, Politics and Museum Presentation

a closed political system such as Germany under the National Socialists, could be distorted from its original positive meaning to its present disposition as a symbol of evil and hatred within a very short period of time. On display for many years in the permanent collection galleries, the grille (to the best of my knowledge) did not elicit any negative reactions from the public. Presented among other politically motivated designed objects, the goal was to convey how governments, whether authoritarian or democratic, enlisted designers to put abstract political ideologies into concrete form using modern methods of mass production and mass communication. Weapons of Mass Dissemination comprised a selection of First and Second World War graphics, decorative arts, paintings and sculptures (Lamonaca and Schleuning 2003). In the early post-9/11 era, the American public rallied around nationalistic language and visual tropes that reinforced civic unity and strength. While it was conceived long before the American public was introduced to the politics of the weapons of mass destruction that led up to the US –Iraqi armed conflict in 2003, during the research and writing phase of the project the decision was made to make a direct link to contemporary political events through a play on words for the show’s title. Taking advantage of the Wolfsonian’s rich holdings of historical propaganda, the curators took a didactic approach to the material. As curator Sarah Schleuning noted in her essay, ‘Manipulating the Masses: Design Strategies in Wartime Propaganda’: ‘Though each piece stands on its own and reflects specific design choices, the graphics and distribution methods employ common strategies – they are not bound to particular political ideologies, languages, or national agendas’ (Schleuning 2003:21). The curatorial organization and interpretation emphasized design elements – choice of colours, images and text – rather than the historical context of the military conflict. The themes were based on the visual strategies used by designers to create persuasive messages: patriotic colour (such as red, white and blue in the US ), national figures (prime minister/ president or national hero), the common man (soldiers or nurses) and national mottoes. By organizing materials into visual groupings, connections could be made by the viewers whether or not they read the interpretive panels. Individual object interpretation provided information about the maker and the design strategies used. The concluding statement of my essay, ‘Mobilizing for War’, summarizes the curatorial perspective: ‘The Wolfsonian’s goal is to provide the context for exploring how visual images shape our perceptions, behavior, and attitudes. We do not see these images as solely historical or static. Instead we invite viewers to find in them the stories, lessons, and values that can shape our own lives today’ (Lamonaca 2003:18). In 2007 I wrote an essay titled ‘Collecting and Exhibiting: Propaganda at The Wolfsonian’ for Kunst und Propaganda: Im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945 (Lamonaca 2007:464–469). The publication accompanied the exhibition of the same name at the Deutsches Historiches Museum (DHM ) in Berlin.9 In the essay I related the systematic steps that The Wolfsonian had taken to create a case for the seriousness of its collecting practices and its curatorial approach. Kunst und Propaganda was a massive undertaking for the DHM . The museum had recently opened its permanent exhibition German History in Images and Artifacts, which comprised ‘more than 7,000 objects’, and as the museum’s website stated, [the exhibition] ‘provides a unique overview of German history within its international context’. Kunst und Propaganda was conceived as another response to the museum’s core mission to present German history in an international context. The exhibition examined German art and design of the National Socialist period within a comparative geo-political framework. German works of the 1930s and early 1940s were shown along with those from the same era in Italy, the Soviet Union and the United States. Kunst und Propaganda was viewed by some critics as a German state-run institution using a comparative analysis to neutralize the stigma of National Socialism on art, design and architecture in Germany. I would argue that the curators’ intentions were not clear. The DHM ’s interpretive strategy for Kunst und Propaganda served to obfuscate rather than to elucidate. The different responses to this strategy may lie within the mission of the institution. The designed objects in the DHM display were acquired as reflections of German history, not, I would argue, examples of politically charged design. Placing these historical objects in 121

Design Objects and the Museum

a comparative display with the works of other nations led to the conclusion, as some members of the German press argued, that a comparative analysis masked, rather than revealed, the particularities of Nazi propaganda (Kilb 2007; Ruppert 2007). Two recent projects at The Wolfsonian addressed political design in very different ways and opened up new possibilities for interpretation in a museum setting. In 2010 The Wolfsonian organized an exhibition from the French national design collection held by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP ) in Paris. Since the CNAP collection comprises over 6,000 objects from all over the world, as curator I decided to look only at works made by French designers in order to reinforce the collection as a reflection of French national identity. For the title of the show I proposed the French motto ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ in order to express that all of the objects are the property of the French State and to raise the question: ‘What is French design?’ To respond to the curatorial programme and to design the exhibition and publication I selected a Paris-based team of matali crasset, M/M (Paris) (Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak) and Alexandra Midal to work with me on the project. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity was organized into seven sections or ‘frames’ beginning with one titled The Frame. A Hermès Kelly handbag, a lifelike ceramic baguette, a Jean Prouvé school desk, a Jean Royère armchair and a Serge Mouille lamp were displayed within an abstract wood frame made of red, white and blue elements with the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity inscribed on them. The juxtaposition of these objects was intended to provoke questions about the basic tenets underpinning French design: handmade vs. machine production, natural vs. artificial materials, extraordinary vs. ordinary objects, and contrasts in monetary value. Each section was a provocation for viewer engagement. Design objects were presented under descriptive titles and within expressive display structures, together with a brief text, to hint at possible interpretations: French Design Digest: The Frame; Armchair Activist: The Barricade; and Starck System: The Star. The section Armchair Activist was accompanied by the following text: After the failure of the May 1968 ‘neo-revolution’, in which students and workers took to the streets and created barricades around the Latin Quarter, a politically engaged formalism emerged in French design. This bourgeois ‘armchair rebellion’ developed a new aesthetic of soft anarchy, positioned uneasily between the conflicting values of leftist ideology and capitalism. A visitor unfamiliar with the May 1968 student uprisings and French politics in the 1960s to 1970s might miss the irony here. Pierre Paulin’s leather sofa appropriately titled Elysée and commissioned by the Mobilier National et Manufactures des Gobelins, de Beauvais, et de las Savonnerie for the Elysée Palace, with its generously padded form finely crafted in sumptuous leather, was shown lined up against the barricade with other similar chairs to visually reinforce the idea of an armchair rebellion. The original intention was to show the chair turned on its side, but the decision was made not to do so. Instead, as you can see in the image, the chairs were lined up close to each other to represent the people massed at the barricades. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity opened up the possibility of using the Wolfsonian’s curatorial methodology with non-Wolfsonian objects. A critical factor for its success was the ability to start with the objects, to discover their stories, and then through them circle back to the political circumstances in which they were made. While the initial intention was to present an ‘American museum’s perspective on French design’ (Lagrange 2011:15), I would argue that the curatorial choices that were made excavated aspects of these design objects that are truly French. With Describing Labor (2012–2013), my curatorial role veered more closely towards ‘producer’ by catalysing and facilitating the artistic vision of Esther Shalev-Gerz (Abess and Lamonaca 2012). Shalev-Gerz used museological techniques that were inflected by her many years of artistic practice that involved investigation, 122

Design, Politics and Museum Presentation

Figure 12.3 Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (installation view), The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, 25 November 2011–26 March 2012. Photo: Silvia Ros. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian– Florida International University (Miami, Florida).

description and performance. The artist began her project by engaging directly with works in the collection. She researched who made the artworks and under what circumstances. The installation comprised the original artworks from the Wolfsonian Collection, a new series of photographs made by the artist in the Wolfsonian’s storage warehouse and videos of people speaking about selected works of art. Visitors encountered the Wolfsonian’s collection through the lens of Shalev-Gerz and the people she invited into her investigation. The presentation did not warrant further curatorial interpretation. As Jacques Rancière wrote in the accompanying publication: The gap between the speech that describes and the visible scanned by the mechanic eye ultimately mirrors the gap that separates the speakers from the moment when the images they are commenting on seemed able to ‘speak’ for themselves . . . Time and again, Esther Shalev-Gerz shows us that things never speak for themselves. They speak to us, that is to say, they tell us about the community that is formed between us through them – provided we try to speak to them, albeit at the risk of approximation, to listen to their speech, to confront it with what our eyes see and with what our own words can say. A labyrinthine process, in a sense (Rancière 2012:71–72). 123

Design Objects and the Museum

In my introductory essay for the publication accompanying Describing Labor I wrote that I had a fleeting, but powerfully moving experience with the ‘artist as curator’ in 1990 when I worked at the Brooklyn Museum (Lamonaca 2012:62). At that time, Joseph Kosuth created The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable in response to the debates over federal funding of the arts through the National Endowment of the Arts.10 Works chosen from the decorative arts department included late-nineteenth-century ceramics with stereotypical depictions of Africans and Asians and chairs by Mies van der Rohe from the Bauhaus. Kosuth invited contemporary museum-goers to confront the realities of shifting notions of taste, social mores, sexuality and intention. In Kosuth’s setting, the Mies chair was unmentionable because it was a product of the Bauhaus, which had been closed down by the National Socialists due to its perceived Marxist and Jewish sensibilities. In recent years, curators of contemporary art and artists as curators have gained visibility in the contemporary art and design world. Their approach to exhibition making veers away from the more didactic role of the curator within a museum.11 Both Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and Describing Labor provided opportunities for looking at objects with fresh eyes. Yet, I am convinced that both projects were successful because each started with careful and critical analysis of objects, not with abstract concepts. In looking back over my nearly twenty years at The Wolfsonian working with politically charged objects I am struck by the realization that audiences rarely, if ever, react negatively to the works on display when they are presented within an interpretive structure that engages them, enabling them to see the manipulative or persuasive aspects of the design. When the Washington Post reviewed the 2001 exhibition, Print, Power, and Persuasion: Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945, it included among five illustrations the Nazi poster Der Ewige Jude from The Wolfsonian. A reader wrote to the editor: ‘Is it necessary in 2001, for thousands upon thousands of people who read the Washington Post, to see so pitiful and degrading of an image of a Jewish person used as propaganda by the Nazis? Couldn’t another choice have been made!’12 The Museum’s Director responded to the reader acknowledging her concerns about the inflammatory image and agreeing that the presentation of the image in the newspaper, out of the curatorial context, ‘could misrepresent our [the museum’s] intentions’.13 In this case, the Wolfsonian’s intention was to show how the Nazi propaganda machine reinforced their anti-Jewish policies through popular culture, in this case a film and the poster for its promotion. The curatorial aim was to unveil the historical strategies and techniques of manipulation that guided their choice of image and text to reveal the heinous politics underpinning it. This Washington Post exchange reveals the primacy of the object as a bearer of meanings and the museum as a cultural construct for the object’s presentation. The selection and juxtaposition of objects, through the agency of the object as a medium of communication, promotes both new readings running against the ‘fixed’ message of political propaganda and encourages the active and critical participation of the viewer. Wolfson’s intentions have always been ‘educational’, and the Museum continues to adhere to a didactic interpretive methodology. Controversies such as the one that arose around the display of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum reinforce the museum’s role in public education and discourse (Gieryn 1998). The museum’s mission and interpretive model must be made clear to its audience in order to establish a basic level of trust. With this in place, institutions and their curators will be able to express their views, whether anticipating controversy or not, about how objects shape and reflect our culture.

Acknowledgements I extend my gratitude to Lisa Li Celoria, Richard Miltner and Amy Silverman at The Wolfsonian for their support. 124

Design, Politics and Museum Presentation

Notes 1. The Wolfsonian was founded in 1986 by Mitchell Wolfson Jr. as a private museum. In 1997 Wolfson donated the collection to the state of Florida and the museum became a unit of Florida International University. 2. See: http://www.wolfsonian.org. 3. The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. 4. In 1986, Wolfson established the Wolfsonian Foundation that would create the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach and the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, Italy. Wolfson also purchased the Washington Storage Company building on Miami Beach to be the Wolfsonian’s headquarters. 5. For an informative historiography of the Wolfsonian Collection, see, Hoffman 2002. 6. Marcel Broodthaers chose the symbolically laden eagle motif for his project Museé d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1972), in which he critiques the institution of the art museum. Rachel Haidu provides an informative overview of the project and suggests a reading of the eagle as a symbol of imperialism. See, Haidu 2010, chapter 4: History. 7. Margolin is referring to Bernard Reilly’s essay, ‘Emblems of Production: Workers in German, Italian and American Art during the 1930s’ in Kaplan 1995a:289. 8. The Wolfsonian’s formative curatorial and research programmes shaped its inaugural exhibition and has also generated the museum’s mission statement, which is: ‘The Wolfsonian uses objects to illustrate the persuasive power of art and design, to explore what it means to be modern, and to tell the story of social, political, and technological changes that have transformed our world. It encourages people to see the world in new ways, and to learn from the past as they shape the present and influence the future.’ See: http://www.wolfsonian.org. 9. See exhibition website: http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/kunst-und-propaganda/english/einleitung.html (Accessed 22 June 2015). 10. Joseph Kosuth’s The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable was on view at the Brooklyn Museum from 27 September 1990 to 31 December 1990. See: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/ exhibitions/819/The_Brooklyn_Museum_Collection%3A_The_Play_of_the_Unmentionable_Joseph_Kosuth (Accessed 22 June 2015). 11. Jens Hoffmann has made an art of writing about contemporary curatorial practice. See: http://www. theutopiandisplay.com/platform/the-art-of-curating-and-the-curating-of-art and Hoffmann 2013. 12. Letter dated 2 June 2001 from Edith K. Pollner to the Washington Post, Inc.; curatorial file, The Wolfsonian-FIU. 13. Response from Wolfsonian Director Cathy Leff to Edith K. Pollner; curatorial file, The Wolfsonian-FIU.

References Abess, M. and Lamonaca, M. (eds) (2012) Esther Shalev-Gerz: Describing Labor. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (pp. 61–65). Art and Propaganda: Clash of Nations, 1930–1945. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum. Exhibition website. http://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/kunst-und-propaganda/english/einleitung.html (Accessed 22 June 2015). The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable. Brooklyn, NY: The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Exhibitions website. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/819/The_Brooklyn_Museum_ Collection%3A_The_Play_of_the_Unmentionable_Joseph_Kosuth (Accessed 22 June 2015). Gieryn, T. F. (1998) ‘Balancing Acts: Science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian’. In Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museum, Science, Culture. London and New York: Routledge (pp. 197–228). Glueck, G. (1984) ‘In Miami, A Heady Mix of Art Works: Gallery View Art in Miami’. New York Times, 22 January 1984, p. H27. Glueck, G. (1989) ‘Omnivore of All Kinds of Objects’. New York Times, 1 June 1989, pp. C1–C6. Haidu, R. (2010) The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Hoffman, J. M. (2002) ‘Defining the Wolfsonian Collection through Objects, Presentations, and Preceptions’. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 24, Design, Culture, Identity: The Wolfsonian Collection, 8–33.

125

Design Objects and the Museum Hoffmann, J. (2005) ‘The Art of Curating and the Curating of Art. Milan, Italy: Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, 2005’. Available online: www.theutopiandisplay.com/platform/the-art-of-curating-and-the-curating-of-art (Accessed 22 June 2015). Hoffmann, J. (ed.) (2013) Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating. Milan: Mousse Publishing, Fiorucci Art Trust. Kaplan, W. (ed.) (1995a) Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian. Kaplan, W. (ed.) (1995b) Exhibition Brochure. Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian. Kilb, A. (2007) ‘Schlacht der Bilder’. Frankfurter Allgemeine, 26 January 2007. Available online: http://www.faz.net/-gsfu6pd (Accessed 22 June 2015). Lagrange, R. (2011) Foreword to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity (p. 15). Lamonaca, M. (2003) ‘Mobilizing for War’. In Lamonaca, M. and Schleuning, S. (eds), Weapons of Mass Dissemination: The Propaganda of War. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (pp. 13–19). Lamonaca, M. (2007) ‘Collecting and Exhibiting: Propaganda at The Wolfsonian’. In Czech, Hans-Jörg and Doll, N. (eds), Kunst und Propaganda. Im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945. Berlin: Deutsche Historisches Museum/Sandstein Verlag (pp. 464–469) Lamonaca, M. (2012) ‘Recontextualizing Labor: A Curator’s Encounter’. In Abess, M. and Lamonaca, M. (eds), Esther Shalev-Gerz: Describing Labor. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (pp. 61–65). Lamonaca, M. and Schleuning, S. (eds) (2003) Weapons of Mass Dissemination: The Propaganda of War. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian–Florida International University. Margolin, V. (1997) ‘Micky Wolfson’s Cabinet of Wonders: From Private Passion to Public Purpose’. Design Issues, Special Issue: Designing the Modern Experience, 1885–1945, 13(1), 67–81. Muschamp, H. (1995) ‘Well-made Surfaces and the Conflicts Lurking Beneath Them’, New York Times, 3 December 1995, p. H38. Rancière, J. (2012) ‘The Age of Labor’. In Abess, M. and Lamonaca, M. (eds), Esther Shalev-Gerz: Describing Labor. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (pp. 67–72). Ruppert, W. (2007) ‘Vier Reiche, vier Fuhrer?’ In der Freitag, 16 February 2007. Available online: http://www.freitag.de/ autoren/der-freitag/vier-reiche-vier-Fuhrer (Accessed 22 June 2015). Schleuning, S. (2003) ‘Manipulating the Masses: Design Strategies in Wartime Propaganda’. In Lamonaca, M. and Schleuning, S. (eds), Weapons of Mass Dissemination: The Propaganda of War. Miami Beach, FL : The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (pp. 21–39). The Wolfsonian Bulletin (1993) ‘Collections Corner’, 1(1), 6.

Website http://www.wolfsonian.org

126

CHAPTER 13 YOU ARE HERE, WE ARE THERE: TRACING NID’S DESIGN HISTORIES Tom Wilson

In the summer of 2013, visitors to the National Institute of Design (NID ) in Ahmedabad, India were confronted with photographs of NID’s early years in striking juxtapositions with the same scene as it appeared today. In a similar contrast between old and new perspectives, objects were displayed in or near the same workshops in which they had been made several decades earlier and within sight of current students operating flaming arc welders and belt sanders. Taking the form of an open-ended and non-linear trail throughout NID’s studios and leafy courtyards, this layering of objects, images and texts representing different historical moments was developed by Exhibition Design and Graphic Design students as an experiment in researching, recording and telling NID’s design histories. Called You Are Here: NID Traces, the exhibition was commissioned by the British Council in India to mark the occasion of the Design History Society annual conference at NID. This was the first time the conference

Figure 13.1 You Are Here: NID Traces, 2013, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Photograph: Tom Wilson. 127

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 13.2 You Are Here: NID Traces, 2013, Metal Workshop with Sind Bicycle by Singanpalli Balaram, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Photograph: Tom Wilson.

had been held outside Europe and, appropriately, it was organized around the theme of ‘Postcolonial Perspectives in Design’. In addition, NID is an excellent lens through which to consider global perspectives of design. Established in 1961 as the first post-independence institution for training in industrial design in India, NID has a particularly interesting history in that it drew on Western pedagogical techniques in the training of industrial designers. Shaped by both local and global forces, NID was the ideal subject for our exhibition. A central concern of postcolonial studies is the way in which non-Western institutions and movements are largely excluded from narratives of mid-century modernism and post-war design. In this regard, NID is no exception. Prevailing historical accounts of NID’s history tend to stress the role of foreign designers during its inception, which has the effect of marginalizing the influence and contributions of Indian designers, politicians and industrialists. This chapter, then, begins with a consideration of NID’s genesis and history from postcolonial perspectives of design before exploring the curatorial and design processes of the exhibition in detail.

Exhibiting modern India The origins of NID owe much to the modernizing impulse of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India. Following independence in 1947, the two main influences on economic policy in India 128

Curating Design at NID, Ahmedabad

were the Gandhian model of the village as a building block for economic and social mobility, and the Western focus on technology-led industrial development (Chatterjee 2005:6). Nehru was an advocate of the latter approach, and believed that India could catch up to its ‘delayed modernity’ by establishing nuclear research programmes, commissioning space studies and building new airports, factories and foundries at an unprecedented rate. Western architects and designers, including Le Corbusier and Louis Khan, were commissioned to undertake large-scale modernizing projects such as the new city of Chandigarh (Prakash 2002). As Saloni Mathur suggests, Nehru’s statement that the nation’s hydroelectric dams were the new ‘temples of modern India’ captures the almost evangelical zeal of the moment (2011). Because of its newly independent status and its strategic geo-political significance, India represented an increasingly important ideological front in the Cold War. Nehru played a key role in the Bandung Conference of 1955, which sought to ‘inject the voice of reason into world affairs’ through a new alliance of the ‘nonaligned’ nations of the world (Prashad 2007:34). United by shared histories of colonialism, the signatories of the conference announced their right to preserve freedom of international action through a refusal to align themselves with any bloc or alliance, particularly those led by the United States or the Soviet Union. The events of Bandung placed the US in a quandary. Holding the Cold War line against communism depended on European solidarity, and yet continuing US support for former European colonial empires risked the resentment of Third World nationalists with experience of colonialism (Parker 2006). Consequently, the US was keen to portray itself as sympathetic to the needs of the non-aligned countries of the world, with the aim of encouraging economic co-operation and increased political solidarity. Museums and exhibitions played an important role in this regard. In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) in New York held an exhibition entitled Textile and Ornamental Arts of India, which was, according to its curator Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., largely concerned with improving socio-cultural relations between the US and India given ‘the urgency with which India today, independent and industrially bourgeoning, was being courted by both parties in the Cold War contest’ (Mathur 2011). As the first large-scale exhibition of Indian culture to be held in the US , Textile and Ornamental Arts of India received considerable media attention and travelled to more than a dozen locations in the US for the next three years. Textile and Ornamental Arts of India marked the start of an alliance between the government of India, MoMA and Western designers. At the opening of the exhibition the American designers Charles and Ray Eames, who had produced a short film for the exhibition, were introduced to a number of Indian writers and academics including cultural activist Pupul Jayakar, best known for her work on the revival of crafts in Indian society. There were increasing concerns within the Indian government that a technology-led development model risked bypassing three-quarters of the Indian population, many of whom relied on traditional methods of manufacture as a source of income (Neuhart, Neuhart and Eames 1989:232). The focus accordingly shifted from building dams and space programmes to accelerating the rejuvenation of small and cottage industries. As Chair of the National Small Industries Corporation, Jayakar introduced the Eames to Nehru, who subsequently invited them to India in order to recommend a design training programme that would equip small- to medium-sized Indian businesses for the challenges of the twentieth century. Design Today Around the same time as the Eames’ invitation to India, the National Small Industries Corporation commissioned a travelling exhibition from MoMA which would be ‘a guide for the rapidly increasing small industries developing in response to the changes in India’s social and economic life’ (MoMA 1959). The exhibition, Design Today in America and Europe, featured 373 examples of ‘well designed household furnishings and equipment’ by European and American designers such as Marcel Breuer, Hans Wegner and 129

Design Objects and the Museum

Tapio Wirkkala. The objects were selected by MoMA and displayed in a series of plywood-panelled pavilions arranged around a central courtyard. The exhibition was designed by George Nelson & Company, and housed in a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome provided by the United States Information Agency. Design Today in America and Europe opened in New Delhi in January 1959 and spent the next two years touring nine cities in India. MoMA intended for the objects in the exhibition to remain in India once the tour had finished, and in 1961 the exhibition was donated to NID to form the nucleus of a permanent design collection. As an example of US cultural diplomacy in India, Design Today was indicative of a certain ‘modernity of affluence, modelled and promoted by America as part of its cold war cultural strategy that sought to demonstrate a fantastic view of future domesticity before an Indian audience’ (Karim 2013:190). The arrival of the touring exhibition in India just four years after the Bandung Conference is surprising, in that its advocacy of Western aesthetic standards and production methods appears antithetical to the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement. The key to understanding Design Today perhaps lies within Nehru’s own vision for a modern India. As Vikramaditya Prakash put it, Nehru had hoped that, in the wake of the sectarian violence following the Partition of India, ‘the newly independent Indian population would sufficiently identify itself with the idea of modernity, re-invent itself, and thereby avoid the continued spectre of ethnic violence’ (Prakash 2002:10). In this regard, Nehru’s desire for modern design as a mode for re-invention is perhaps understandable. The goal was not to reproduce the West but to invent a new Indian modern. The India Report In 1957 the Eames spent three months travelling around India. They visited factories, village industries and met with artists and craftsmen in order to familiarize themselves with Indian industry and design traditions, and their findings were published in 1958 as The India Report. Beginning with a passage from the Sanskrit philosophical text, the Bhagavad Gita, the report outlined India’s relationship with a rapidly modernizing world. India was facing, they believed, change that was a ‘change in kind not a change of degree’ as the world moved into the communication age. The ‘phenomenon of communication’, they argued, was not ‘some influence of the West on the East’, but rather, ‘something that affects a world not a country’. Accordingly, they suggested that instead of mimesis as a basis for modernization, India should draw on and recognize its own centuries-old tradition of design. The Eames used the lota, a ‘simple vessel of everyday use’ as their example of design thinking, listing ‘the optimum amount of liquid to be fetched’ to ‘the way it would be transported’ and ‘the size and strength of the hands that would manipulate it’. They argued that the problem-solving processes that went into designing the lota could be replicated and repeated, and recommended the establishment of a national design institute that would undertake research into design and train the next generations of designers. The hope was that such an institution would generate an attitude ‘that will appraise and solve the problems of our coming times’ (Eames and Eames 1958). The publication of The India Report was met with surprise. While the government expected a feasibility report of how design could benefit the Indian economy, what they got was a consideration of the current social conditions in India. Although there were obvious advantages to the Eames’ proposals (especially in its promise to liberate design education in India from its association with British art schools, which institutionalized a distinction between Western ‘fine arts’ and Indian ‘village crafts’) (Balaram 2005:11; Mathur 2011), their apparent advocation of the village as a self-sufficient economic unit caused concern within the government. Pupal Jayakar recounted how the meeting in which the Eames presented their ideas was marked by the ‘utter chaos of communications’, and that she and others had to work hard to convince the government that the Ghandian spirit of the report did not preclude industrial progress (Jayakar 1979:3–7). After repeated assurances, the government approved the establishment of a National Institute of Design. 130

Curating Design at NID, Ahmedabad

NID begins In September 1961, NID was established under the leadership of the Ahmedabad-based industrialists Gautam and Gira Sarabhai. The owners of the Calico Textile Mills in Ahmedabad, the Sarabhais were strong advocates of design and had built relationships with many Western artists and designers, such as Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg and Le Corbusier, who later designed a house on the Sarabhai family estate in Ahmedabad. Gira Sarabhai had been a student at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin in the late 1940s, and began work on designing a campus in the Paldi district of Ahmedabad. The choice of city for the new institute was significant. The capital of India’s textile industry since the nineteenth century, Ahmedabad was also the site of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram where he led his boycott of British industrially made goods (Mathur 2011). In this regard, the establishment of NID in Ahmedabad thus represented both a symbolic break with British imperial manufacturing dominance and India’s move towards industrialization. When the building was completed in 1964, it bore an unmistakable resemblance to a factory with its reinforced concrete frame, large plate glass windows and stripped away decoration and was clearly intended to showcase NID as a symbol of a modern, industrialized India. As NID had no dedicated teachers with experience in industrial design, the selection of suitably qualified faculty was a priority. The Sarabhais strongly believed that NID should learn from teaching methods established in Europe and the United States, and took a leading role in recruiting guest faculty and visiting designers from around the world. In 1964, the German designer Hans Gugelot from the Hoschule für Gestaltung in Ulm was invited to visit NID and develop a range of training exercises. Gugelot subsequently spent two weeks at NID in the summer of 1965, during which he oversaw the design of a tangential fan and a project to design low-cost furniture from standardized sections of wood from Ahmedabad’s timber yards. With its emphasis on problem solving and mass production, the pedagogical method devised at HfG Ulm, and the Vorkurs preliminary course developed at the Bauhaus, subsequently underpinned much of the NID curriculum for the next decades (Karim 2013). Consultancy became the means by which the new institute learnt educational techniques from around the world, and NID faculty candidates went to international studios on apprenticeships. The Indian designer Gajanan Upadhayay, who worked with Gugelot on the furniture project in 1965, studied furniture design at Copenhagen from 1966 to 1967, and taught at NID on his return to India. The Swiss designer Hans Theo Baumann introduced classes in Colour Composition and Elements of Form and Design to the Ceramic Design programme, while the Graphic Design programme was modelled after Armin Hoffman’s Swiss school at Basel, and the Textile Design programme was influenced by both Scandinavian weaving traditions and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. However, the pedagogical approaches developed at NID were not exclusively influenced by any particular foreign school, or by Western approaches in general. As Singanapalli Balaram has forcefully argued, the early years of NID was a time when faculty and students ‘examined the curricula and outcomes of the great design schools in order to learn more what not to do than what to do’ (Balaram 2005:15). Although Western cultural institutions appear to be significant influences, Indian needs and realities prevailed. Tracing NID ’s roots Today, NID is one of the premier educational institutions in India, and continues to set the pedagogic standard for other design schools in the country and in the developing world (Balaram 2005:11). Despite its far-reaching influence, design historian Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan recently suggested that, although NID retains a sense of purpose with ‘the remnants of Nehruvian idealism still palpable on campus’, it is nonetheless missing a 131

Design Objects and the Museum

‘robust or realistic sense of our roots’. The question of where NID’s roots lay, and how they could be traced and articulated, was ‘the challenge before us’ (Balasubrahmanyan 2012). The problem has its origins in difficulties engaging with or reflecting on NID’s design history. As well as being written in an often inextricable social-science or art-historical manner, much of the worldview of design historical texts tends to be ‘west-centric’, and written within a conceptual framework ‘derived or connected to western philosophical trajectories’. According to Balasubrahmanyan (2012), practitioners who do not or cannot engage with their own (design) histories results: in their functioning ahistorically, cast adrift without roots to provide anchors, vulnerable to the whims and vagaries of State and markets, leading to a weakening of the agency of design and designers. And this is a critical situation given the present scenario of cultural homogenization set in motion by globalization. Now, more than ever, design practitioners need a place in the past from where to respond to the present in order to shape the future. What is needed, argues Balasubrahmanyan, is for more designers ‘to write their view of the history of their practice [and] more writing needs to come from places like India to join the debate and fill the lacunae’ (2012). It was in this context that I was asked to work with Exhibition Design and Graphic Design students at NID as part of the British Council’s Design Curation Programme in India. Established by the Foreign Office in 1934, the British Council’s remit is to build mutually beneficial relationships between the UK and other countries through the development of cultural relations (Donaldson 1984). While the British Council is an independent body in that it does not carry out its functions on behalf of the British Crown, its activities are nonetheless allied with the UK government’s aim of spreading and strengthening spheres of British influence and values abroad. In this regard, the British Council is continually negotiating its own history as a colonial organization in a postcolonial world. For this project, my travel expenses were funded by the British Council and I was required to write a report on my return, but otherwise the British Council had no say or direction regarding the project itself. The original remit for our project, jointly drafted by the British Council and NID, was to hold an exhibition based on NID’s collection of modern design objects, much of which consisted of objects from the 1959 Design Today travelling exhibition. During early brainstorming sessions between NID students, faculty and myself, we felt that the Design Today objects, although important as a capsule collection and as evidence of Western cultural diplomacy in India, said little about NID itself, its history or the work of Indian designers since independence. In addition, to put on an exhibition consisting mainly of objects from Design Today ran the risk of reinforcing the impression that Western design norms, products and aesthetic standards represent the ‘benchmark’ for professional design. Likewise, to present the assimilation of Western design principles into India as ‘seamless’ would be to make a similar ideological assumption that Western technological and pedagogical approaches to design are inherently superior. The discourse surrounding The India Report is particularly revealing here. For all its progressive rhetoric, the report was flawed in several respects. It did not take into account existing approaches to design education in India (in particular the work of Rabindranath Tagore and the Vishwa Bharati University in West Bengal) and was arguably romanticist in its assessment of how design could help small-scale workers (Soumitri 2002). Charles Eames’ admiration of the Indian lota, which he described as ‘the greatest, the most beautiful’ object, was received with embarrassment in India because of the lota’s cultural association with washing oneself, hygiene and defecation. Despite its faults, Balasubrahmanyan satirically noted how The India Report ‘rapidly gained the status of a Design Purana that would guide us to rescue India from the shambles of colonialism’ (2012). Balasubrahmanyan’s reference to Hindu religious narratives suggests something about the 132

Curating Design at NID, Ahmedabad

way in which The India Report is regarded within NID today, which in turn reflects the Eames’ exalted status within Western design histories. Although The India Report is undoubtedly an important formative influence on NID’s inception, to focus too heavily on the contributions of the Eames and other foreign designers would be to miss out the way in which the incorporation of Western ideas into India was marked by debates, discussions and experiments, and the way in which NID’s subsequent development was influenced by local needs and contexts. As a result, we decided to adapt the original British Council brief in order to examine NID’s history as one that emerged from a co-operative collaboration between Western and Indian designers and educators. In this way, we could also highlight the work of Indian designers, technicians and students to an audience already familiar with the Eames’ contributions to post-war design. And by doing so, we could take up Balasubrahmanyan’s challenge to trace, articulate and display NID’s roots. You Are Here: NID Traces Our starting point was to consider the NID campus, buildings and workshops as a palimpsest. By investigating the way in which information is inscribed, wiped clean and re-inscribed onto the same surface, we could bring aspects of NID’s history to the surface in striking juxtapositions with NID as it stood today. This led us to develop the idea of the exhibition as a trail rather than a static space. This had several advantages. By leading through the workshops and studios, we could involve NID’s technicians and faculty in the process, and it would allow us to display objects in an exciting and unexpected context. Lastly, it would serve as orientation for conference delegates. The trail began with an introduction to NID’s inception alongside a series of photographs showing the site as it stood before and during building work. Bright orange arrows directed visitors through NID’s workshops, each of which had a focal display that explained the history of that department as well as highlighting the contributions of important Indian designers to its development. Along the trail, signs explained the significance of certain aspects of the NID building and campus, such as its distinctive orange cast-iron spiral staircases, while large photographs made from recently discovered old negatives of NID’s early years were placed as close as possible to where they had been taken several decades earlier. After leading through the studios, the trail ended by passing through areas nominated by students as important to understanding NID’s character today, such as the BMW Cafe, Chai Gate and Design Street, a cross-campus thoroughfare with displays of current student work to either side. For each of the focal displays in the workshops, students chose a department and researched its history, and selected objects and photographs that they felt best explained or demonstrated a particular aspect of that department’s history.While the pedagogical spirit of Ulm and other Western educational institutes underpinned much of NID’s early work, we wanted to show how the final outcome of early design projects was often determined by local needs and attitudes. In the Metal workshop, for example, we showed Balaram’s Sind Bicycle (c.1960s), an exercise in redesigning the bicycle for a specifically Indian context (see Fig.  13.2). Featuring a stronger and lighter frame, it was made using local materials and techniques, featured a shelf on the back for carrying things and could be repaired without a tool kit (Balaram 2011). In the Woodwork studio, we displayed a chair made to schematics drawn up by Japanese-American woodworker George Nakashima (who visited NID in 1964), which was subsequently batch produced in the NID workshops. The first chairs were made using rosewood, but subsequent batches were made using moulded plywood, fibre and even metal. Although the use of industrial materials appears contrary to Nakashima’s philosophy of truth to natural forms, it showed how NID faculty and students sought to experiment with and hybridize Western approaches in order to meet Indian needs. 133

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 13.3 You Are Here: NID Traces, 2013, Woodwork Workshop with chair produced to scheme by George Nakashima, c.1964, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Photograph: Tom Wilson. Students developed a striking method of display that ‘framed’ the workshops and were positioned in such a way that visitors could step through and engage with the objects on show. In the Ceramics workshop for example, a teapot by Dashrath Patel (c.1960s), who was also the founding secretary of NID, was made available for visitors to touch, pick up and discover for themselves after they had stepped through the frame. The collaborative process of researching NID’s history informed the design of the exhibition in many ways. There was a strong desire to incorporate a spoken element to the exhibition, to reflect India’s strong oral culture and ways of sharing information. Much of the information presented was collected through conversations with current faculty and technicians, and it was decided to have them on hand in the workshops in order to highlight their own contributions to NID’s history, as well as answering visitors’ questions. At one point, there was even a proposal to have human signposts around the campus, instead of orange arrows. They would offer information about a particular area before pointing the way to the next exhibit. This was intended to reflect the fact that finding the way in India is mainly done by asking for directions. Throughout the process the students were constantly engaging with alternative ways of displaying objects and telling stories, and trying to build such questions into the design of the exhibition itself. You Are Here, We Are There You Are Here did not claim to be a definitive or comprehensive history of NID. Rather, it is best seen as an experiment in exploring alternative ways of telling and displaying NID’s history. In selecting objects, images

134

Curating Design at NID, Ahmedabad

and spaces for the exhibition, we were concerned with not only how Western ideas were translated into the new Indian nation-state, but also the way in which such ideas were received, challenged and adapted within an Indian milieu. And in doing so, it provided a space for NID’s faculty, students and alumni to join in by contributing their own interpretations and by writing their own design histories. After all, the quality of palimpsest is also found in the human mind, in layers of memory, in the sharing of information and in the telling of stories.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the British Council in India, especially Aanchal Sodhani, for making the project possible in the first place. The production of You Are Here: NID Traces would not have been possible without the tireless work, organizational skills and creative talent of Harnehmat Sachdeva. Special thanks go to the content and design teams, especially Hena Najeeb, Ishita Jain, Aadarsh Rajan, Pragun Argawal, Akash Seshadari, Nidhi Rathore and the many first-year design students who helped with installing the exhibition. My gratitude goes to the faculty members who kindly gave their time towards the production of the exhibition, especially Arathi Abraham, Tridha Gajjar, Rupesh Vyas, Tarundeep Girdher, Aditi Ranjan, Romanie Jaitley, Neelima Hasija, Jayanthi Naik, M. P. Ranjan, L. C. Ujjawane, Praveen Nahar, Shreyasi Parikh and Sirish Patel. Finally, I would like to extend warm thanks to Tanishka Kachru for her unstinting support, good humour and very generous hospitality.

References Balaram, S. (2005) ‘Design Pedagogy in India: A Perspective’, Design Issues, 21(4), 11–22. Balaram, S. (2011) Thinking Design. New Delhi: SAGE . Balasubrahmanyan, S. (2012) ‘The Search For Culturally Relevant Roots: Towards Writing A History of Design in India’, Take – Sculpture, 10. Available online: http://takeonartmagazine.com/the-search-for-culturally-relevant-rootstowards-writing-a-history-of-design-in-india/ (Accessed 17 April 2014). Chatterjee, A. (2005) ‘Design in India: The Experience of Transition’, Design Issues, 21(4), 4–10. Donaldson, F. (1984) The British Council: The First Fifty Years. London: J. Cape. Eames, C. and Eames, R. (1958) The India Report. Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design. Jayakar, P. (1979) ‘Charles Eames 1907–1978: A Personal Tribute’. Design Folio, 2. Ahmedabad: National Institute of Design. Karim, F. S. (2013) ‘MoMA , the Ulm and the Development of Design Pedagogy in India’. In Jhaveri, S. (ed.), Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design. London: Thames and Hudson (pp. 127–128). Mathur, S. (2011) ‘Charles and Ray Eames in India’. Art Journal, 70(1). New York: The College Art Association. Available online: http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=1735 (Accessed 17 April 2014). MoMA (1959) ‘Design Today in America and Europe’ Press Release, 16 January 1959. Available online: https://www. moma.org/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2469/releases/MOMA _1959_0035.pdf?2010 (Accessed 17 April 2014). Neuhart J., Neuhart, M. and Eames, R. (1989) Eames Design. New York: Harry N. Abrahams. Parker, J. C. (2006) ‘Small Victory, Missed Chance: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Turning of the Cold War’. In Statler, K. C. and Johns, A. L. (eds), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War. Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield (pp. 153–174). Prakash, V. (2002) Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Prashad, V. (2007) The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York and London: New Press. Soumitri, G. V. (2002) ‘The Project of Industrial Design in India’. Paper presented at Mind the Map, Design History Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, 11 July 2002.

135

136

CHAPTER 14 JUST WHAT IS IT THAT MAKES CURATING DESIGN SO DIFFERENT, SO APPEALING? Helen Charman

This chapter explores some of the challenges of exhibiting design objects in the museum context, and the commensurate curatorial strategies employed in response. In so doing, it considers whether the activity of curating design carries any distinctive characteristics. The title deliberately calls to mind the Independent Group’s exhibition This is Tomorrow, shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, 1956, for which visual artist Richard Hamilton made the exhibition’s famous collage Just What is it that makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing? Subsequently, Hamilton has been credited with introducing multidisciplinary thinking between art, architecture and design into the eclectic mainstream of visual arts practice and display (Hunt 2008). Yet multidisciplinary thinking as a conceit has its roots earlier in the twentieth century – predominantly in the Bauhaus’s collaborative, inclusive ethos and vision writ large under its 1920s slogan ‘Art and technology: a new unity’.1 Yet while the Bauhaus vision was predicated on an even-handed approach to aesthetic appreciation and the industrial context for design, the ensuing multidisciplinary practices that explore and debate the interplay across art, design and architecture have seen this approach recede. This begs the question: Which comes first, the design object in and of itself, or curatorial intention, with the latter informed by commensurate institutional drivers such as governance, directorial vision, stakeholder interests and historical framings? Arguably, the multidisciplinary approach can do design a disservice in the exhibition context because it may obscure some of the intrinsic characteristics of design as a creative activity shaped by a brief, rooted in industrial/commercial contexts, with a purposeful, broadly utility focused outcome. The title’s nod to Hamilton is a provocation to pull focus on some of these intrinsic qualities. Scholarship focusing specifically on the nuances and complexities of curating design in the museum context, by which I mean writing that underpins curatorial practice with critical, intellectual rigour and historical coordinates, is at a relatively nascent stage, certainly when placed in a wider context of curating art (O’Neill 2012; Smith 2012).2 Curatorial practice tends towards an emphasis on product design and its commensurate aesthetic or stylistic properties, with monographic exhibitions dominating more nuanced thematic or propositional approaches. Curating the more intangible practices of design such as design processes, service or experiential design is at best emergent. As Gareth Williams explores, design in the museum context has historically occupied a peripheral position within exhibition making, and as such a body of critical writing, professional discourse and academic research is only slowly beginning to emerge (Jeppsson 2010; Staniszewski 1999). Museums have a chequered relationship with design, at various times seeing it as the poor relation of architecture, as commercialised fine art, as evidence of social or technological history, or as the antithesis of craft skills. . . . Design has been in the blind spot of museums (Williams 2010). This current book is a welcome and timely addition to the field. Within the broader ambition of Design Objects and the Museum, this chapter seeks to illuminate that ‘blind spot’ by exploring the practice of curating contemporary design within the institutional context of the Design Museum, London. The chapter draws on a series of professional reflective conversations between the Director of Learning and Research at the Design Museum (the author), curatorial colleagues in the Exhibitions team (anonymized throughout) and qualitative 137

Design Objects and the Museum

visitor research undertaken as part of the author’s doctoral research (Charman 2010). From this research, three key challenges emerge for the curator of design, explored in three sections as follows: first, in ‘Design is not art’, the co-option of design by aesthetically driven curatorial display strategies; second, in ‘Reframing the familiar’, that the objects exhibited are often everyday and in that respect not particularly noteworthy; and finally, in ‘The immersive environment’, that the spatial context within which exhibiting design takes place is itself a discipline of design and as such can compete with, and perhaps overshadow, an exhibition’s content.

Design is not art Historically, co-opting design into the language of art display was a strategic and bold move to put design on an equal footing with art, most famously in Philip Johnson’s Machine Art exhibition, 1934, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ), where visitors were invited to appreciate the sculptural beauty of a ballbearing amongst other industrially produced objects and components. Not all of them did. Another radical strategy in the early part of the twentieth century was the pioneering work of the American librarian and museum director John Cotton Dana, whose arguments for the museum’s founding principles of engagement, education and public access included advocacy for the beauty of the everyday (Meecham and Sheldon 2009). Criticizing snobbery, Dana asserted: ‘beauty bears no relation to age, rarity, or price’ (Ford 2006:2). To encourage recognition and enjoyment of beauty in commonplace things, Dana once exhibited well-designed pottery that he had procured from a five- and ten-cent store, proudly announcing that not a single piece had cost more than 25 cents (Ford 2006:2). Given that design objects predominantly fall within the category of the everyday, or even the mundane, the act of plucking design from its utilitarian context and representing it within the museum space fractures the viewers’ relationship with the object. It enables design to be seen and understood afresh. Dana’s curatorial approach endures, a precursor to Industrial Facility’s Under a Fiver exhibition at the Design Museum, 2008, and Humble Masterpieces at New York’s MoMA , 2004.3 Walter Benjamin’s proposal that technology puts paid to the individuated and unique aura of the work of art (Benjamin 2002) is a thesis that nonetheless saw the potential for manifold progressive possibilities in the loss of aura. In a reversal of this, presenting design as art might be said to invest the everyday with something of that ‘aura’, reframing design for contemplative and aesthetic consideration. You want to give each object that moment of contemplation . . . it’s a moment to think about the effort and thought that goes into the simplest of things. It’s a bit of beauty – you want people to appreciate how beauty can be mass-produced and simple (Curator C). Given design’s dominant raison d’être in mass production and utility, the exhibition context reframes design, affording visitors new and unexpected encounters that re-tune their experience to greater aesthetic appreciation. Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky (1965) argues this point in ‘Art as Technique’. Shklovsky bemoans how by virtue of everyday use and encounter, we become so over-familiar with the objects that surround us and the language with which we communicate, that both object and language cease to exist beyond the most cursory usage. He terms this process ‘habitualization’ and attributes it some fearsome characteristics: Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war . . . we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette (Shklovsky 1965). 138

Curating in Design Museums

What is needed to dispel habitualization is something to call our attention back to a state of precision, a process of de-familiarization that Shklovsky attributes to art, but that can also be achieved through the relocation of the everyday design object to the exhibition context of the museum. Through locating objects differently, the exhibition ‘dis-acquaints’ the visitor with design: The approach is about pulling the object out of context . . . sometimes you need to pull things that have been too iconic back into their original context, their historic context, or their process context . . . bring them back down to earth when they have become a bit too rarefied . . . whereas sometimes a basic object such as a glass needs to be rarefied, given space. It’s to make you think about that object, take it out of its pigeonhole (Curator C). However persuasive the argument or widespread the approach, exhibiting design for the foremost purpose of aesthetic appreciation can be deeply problematic. Pushing stylistic readings of the objects to the fore and framing them as works of art leaves unasked those process-oriented questions about the why, the how or the ‘for whom’ that are integral within, and pursuant to, design as a functional discipline. Indeed, Adrian Forty argues in Objects of Desire that a purely aesthetic approach to exhibiting design can have a trivializing effect, in which the design object is ‘relegated . . . to the status of a mere cultural appendix’ (Forty 2005:6). He proposes that the formalist approach should be counterbalanced by placing the design object within its socio-cultural and industrial contexts in order to convey the agency of design as an active force shaping human behaviour and the world. In this view, visitors to the Design Museum concur: ‘Design needs context, it needs personal relevance, even if it’s just being able to imagine how it works’ (Visitor A). A more nuanced curatorial strategy is that of ‘both/and’. This approach gives space to aesthetic, stylistic, formal contemplation but not at the expense of insights into the multiple processes and contexts that inform design. Barber and Osgerby’s In the Making exhibition, at the Design Museum, 2014, enchantingly exhibited industrial designs interrupted at various stages in their manufacturing processes, communicated to the visitor as, for example, ‘Tennis Ball, paused at 50%’; ‘French Horn, paused at 75%’; ‘Pencil, paused at 60%’. The labels for the objects were discreetly positioned to promote visual engagement in the first instance, and to call attention, in an understated way, to a single moment in the manufacturing process. Visitors enjoyed fathoming the identity of the objects, and conversation often turned to the tooling involved in the process. Barber and Osgerby have an ongoing curiosity about the intimate relationship between design and the manufacturing process, and this ethos was sensitively conveyed. For those visitors interested to know more, the exhibition concluded with a wall of booklets focusing on each object and setting out the manufacturing process and end product in more detail. Communicating process is an integral dimension of curating design objects if the intention is that they are to be understood authentically as design. The manufacturing context tells us more about society and the object’s place in society. It’s important to provide this kind of detail when possible, because information affects your judgement of something (Curator C). If we understand design objects as the reification of ideas into material form, then these ideas need to be communicated to the visitor. Put crudely, visitors are not going to develop a full understanding of a design merely by communing with its stylistic or formal properties, although they may nevertheless have a meaningful interpretive experience (as art). Design curators need to be well versed in ways of communicating the multiple contexts that shape design. They have a range of interpretive tools at their disposal – infographics, photographs, moving image, handling objects, audio interview – which can be used effectively to offer 139

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 14.1 Pencil paused at 60%, In the Making, curator Barber Osgerby, Design Museum, London, 2014. Photograph: Helen Charman, courtesy of the Design Museum, London.

contextual insights. These contexts – political, environmental, social, technological, economic, cultural – will foster greater appreciation and understanding. This contextual approach is similarly embedded in the Design Museum’s ‘designerly learning’ pedagogy, which teaches learners to read design critically across multiple perspectives and contexts: ‘Learning how much effort goes into producing these items I think is key to understanding them’ (Visitor B).4 Sometimes the strategy is to curate the design process as an integral component of an exhibition, for example 2013’s digital maker lab in The Future is Here, which was staffed by members of the museum’s visitor experience team who were also digital makers. At any one time the visitor could see 3D design and printing in action and discuss the process with a practitioner, before viewing the lab’s outputs, or the exhibition exhibits, or sitting at a reading table and diving deeper into the subject. An accompanying series of ‘Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About . . .’ public talks offered further insight into a potentially paradigm-shifting innovation in the relationship between designer, manufacturer and user (Anderson 2012). On other occasions, more subtle curatorial approaches to communicating process might be achieved by displaying moulds, prototypes, fabric swatches, mood boards and sketchbooks, or by restaging the studio context, or even, in 2013’s Hello My Name is Paul Smith, by restaging the retail environment itself (Smith’s first shop in Nottingham). To curate design is not to be coy about the relationship between culture, client and commerce: the market context is an important factor in understanding the role of design, the creative agency it creates or catalyses, the situations it engenders and the lives it shapes. Design is not art – and therefore design curating needs to communicate the stories behind the design object and its future possibilities, and bring these to life for the visitor. 140

Curating in Design Museums

The way we present design at the Design Museum is about its impact, about the power of design to improve our lives, the way in which design operates in our lives – it could be a new aesthetic, process or working with a new material. It’s the stories behind and around design (Curator A).

Reframing the familiar If we concur that design is not art, what of the question of design’s status as a serious cultural activity? Exhibiting in the context of the museum affords design what Stephen Bayley, inaugural Director of the Design Museum in 1989, described as ‘cultural gravitas’. Cultural gravitas counterbalances perceptions of design’s commercial, ‘lifestyle’ or industrial contexts, which can crowd out more nuanced understanding of design as, for example, a field of intellectual enquiry, technological innovation or cultural expression. Significantly, the word ‘design’ is conspicuously absent in Raymond Williams’ seminal 1975 cultural studies text, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (and did not even make it into the later 1983 revision). In 1982 Sir Terence Conran established the Boilerhouse Project at the Victoria and Albert Museum with Bayley at the helm, in a deliberate attempt to bring debate about the cultural value of design to public attention. While at the outset the curatorial strategies invoked by Bayley were deliberately provocative – an exhibition on taste in which objects deemed ‘good’ examples were exhibited on plinths, and ‘bad’ examples atop dustbins – the drive to open up a reflective public space to think seriously about design, and to understand the value of design in its broadest cultural sense, has been writ large in the work of the Design Museum ever since. It is the overarching mission of the institution and underpins curatorial approaches. Today, however, the Design Museum’s curatorial sensibility is less exposition, more proposition. This is most aptly demonstrated in the museum’s annual Designs of the Year exhibition. This exhibition comprises a selection of up to 100 multidisciplinary and international works of contemporary design from the previous year. These works provide insight into the preoccupations, needs, wants, desires, trends and concerns that fuel a creative brief and tell us what it is to live in an increasingly complex world. There is something for everyone in Designs of the Year, and given the mission of the museum, that everyone ‘understands the value of design’, this breadth of content is important. The selection of exhibits is drawn from a broader list of nominations made by an external panel of critics, practitioners and academics across design and related fields. Offering a broad array of contemporary design ranging from conceptual or prototype stage through to produced works, from kick-starter, crowd-sourced initiatives to public sector services, the exhibition acts as a barometer for understanding the value of design across both professional and public perspectives. It does this most explicitly through the rubric of the competition. A jury of professionals representing design and related fields (such as journalism, academia, industry) decide an overall exhibition winner and category winners based on architecture, digital, fashion, furniture, graphic, product and transport design. Crucially, all visitors are invited to cast their vote whilst in the exhibition as part of a public vote that runs complementary to the jury process, posting their ballot paper into a box brimming with value judgements on a daily basis (as well as online). Live results are displayed in the exhibition, which becomes as much a focus for attention and discussion as the exhibits. At the time of writing, jostling for top place were: Chineasy, ShaoLan Hsueh’s simple graphic illustration method for understanding Chinese; Peek, a portable eye examination kit for health-care professionals working in the remotest of settings, designed by Peek Vision UK ; and Dumb Ways to Die, a viral public information film designed by McCann Australia for Melbourne Metro Trains, in which cartoon characters suffer comedic if grisly deaths for eschewing safety rules. None of these were the jury’s overall winning choice – the 2014 winning design being Zaha Hadid’s undulating Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, 141

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 14.2 Comments board and visitors, Designs of the Year 2014, Design Museum, London. Photograph: Helen Charman, courtesy of the Design Museum, London.

142

Curating in Design Museums

Azerbaijan. Visitors are also invited to share written responses to the nominations by responding to these questions, and clipping their responses to large display boards given as equal prominence as the exhibits: What makes a design of the year? How has design made a difference to your day? What would you design? How can design change our world? The questions give space for contemplative, serious consideration of design, and promote visitor-led interpretation and engagement. This is a strategy located within the museological shift towards understanding the active role visitors play in experiential meaning-making (Lang, Reeve and Woollard 2006; HooperGreenhill 2011), in which curating enables the generation and production of cultural meanings from the perspective of the individual visitor (Black 2005; Simon 2010): ‘The museum is saying, with confidence, there are all these things happening in design, and we want you to think about them too’ (Curator B). It is also a strategy that enables the museum to gain insight into visitors’ perspectives on design, which at best can loop back into the curatorial process. By the very act of selection and display, the museum is endorsing a design object as worthy of visitor attention and, arguably, contributing to the formation of a design canon. The curatorial strategy is to engage the visitor in debate about design but not to tell them what to think or to be overly directive in their experience of the exhibition. In the 2014 iteration, the emergent themes – Connect, Thought, Delight, Care and Situation – were woven across the displays with a deliberately light touch to enable those visitors who preferred to find their own way both physically, but also conceptually, through the exhibition. This strategy sees the museum concerned not to promote itself as a singular authority on its subject, but to act as a catalyst or hub for discursive, critical engagement with design both with the general public and the design community. The commensurate curatorial strategy is a deft act of facilitation and advocacy for the role and value of design, providing the visitor with a range of insights from the professional and expert to the lay person, to enable them to join the conversation on design and ‘enter the world of design from different perspectives and form their own ideas about that world’ (Curator D).

The immersive environment An exhibition creates a temporary environment for design, in which the relationship between exhibition content and the spatial design of the exhibition itself is somewhat complex. Given that both content and environment are design disciplines, the task of the curator is to achieve a careful symbiosis between the two disciplines – a curatorial balancing act that ensures that exhibition design does not overwhelm exhibition content and ensures that the exhibits are ‘allowed space to breathe’ (Curator D). Spatial design is understood as an opportunity to experiment with the possibilities of presenting design in the exhibition context, ‘pushing things forward visually and spatially’ (Curator B). Recalling the interplay and inclusive ethos of the Bauhaus, particularly under Bayer, exhibition design is described as playing a key communication role in ‘conveying argument, and reinforcing the notion of the exhibition’ (Curator A). To achieve this, curators look for exhibition designers who can adopt a holistic, immersive approach. The ideal exhibition designers are those who immerse themselves . . . and through that willingness to understand a person’s work or theme, they get under the skin of it and also understand what we are trying to do. This is often where something very good happens, and that comes through in the visitor experience (Curator B). There are few blueprints for design curating. The experimental and reflexive approaches to exhibition design developed at the Bauhaus are cited as one of the foremost influences on the early years of temporary exhibitions 143

Design Objects and the Museum

at MoMA (Staniszewski 1999). The intrinsic relationship between exhibition design and exhibition content described by curators at the Design Museum can also be understood as a legacy from the Bauhaus. For Bayer, writing in Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums (1961), exhibition design gained a new status not as a field within design but, significantly, as a distinct discipline: Exhibition design has evolved as a new discipline, as an apex of all media and powers of communication and of collective efforts and effects. The combined means of visual communication constitutes a remarkable complexity: language as visible printing or as sound, pictures as symbols, paintings and photographs, sculptural media, materials and surfaces, color, light, movement (of the display as well as the visitor), films, diagrams and charts. The total application of all plastic and psychological means (more than anything else) makes exhibition design an intensified and new language (Bayer quoted in Staniszewski 1999:3). Arguably, Bayer’s ‘new language’ of exhibition design has become a key distinguishing feature of curating design, alongside the process-oriented approach and the drive to afford design greater cultural and critical value. It is a language that evolved through Frederick Kiesler’s work at Paris’s L’Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, 1925, notable for its holistic approach to exhibition content, design and visitor experience. Clearly influenced by his background in architecture and theatre design, Kiesler’s approach locates the object displayed in the exhibition context as an integral component within an expanding exhibition environment, rather than as autonomous or individuated entity. Through so doing, the environment itself assumes the same importance as the exhibited object: they function in tandem to shape and visitor experience and convey meaning (Staniszewski 1999:69–72). Alice Rawsthorn cites further examples of the immersive approach to exhibition making. These include German curator Alexander Dorner’s 1920s’ experimental Atmosphere Rooms at the Landesmusuem in Hanover, exploring the interplay between art, design and architecture to convey the cultural history of particular eras, and Herbert Read’s radical programme of art and design exhibitions at the London Gallery in the 1930s with their notable interdisciplinary approach (Rawsthorn 2013:113–114). The holistic, interdisciplinary approach is a powerful strategy that evokes experiential engagement and promotes affective responses to the works. The museum’s done brilliantly – there’s written information, there’s visual information, you might have a film, you might have the product in front of you, things are hanging from the ceiling, things are hanging on the walls, things are right in front of you . . . you’re walking around a big space, you’re walking around a small space, it’s light, it’s dark. You feel totally absorbed (Visitor C). It is a strategy predominantly used at the Design Museum in fashion exhibitions including Chalayan: From Fashion and Back (2009); Christian Louboutin (2012); and Hello My Name is Paul Smith (2013–2014). Each of these exhibitions created an ‘immersive environment that uses the power of experience over explanation to communicate ideas’ (Curator A), differentiating and distinguishing design curating from Brian O’Doherty’s ideal-type white cube gallery environment, in which everything but the work itself is expunged in order to provide an unadulterated pure visual engagement with art. ‘The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all clues that interfere with the fact that it is “art”. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself ’ (O’Doherty 2000:14). But the immersive approach is not self-reflexive installation art. Crucially, these exhibitions also include elements both of design process (for example, restaging the design studio in Louboutin and in Paul Smith) and of professional context, for example, including footage of catwalk shows in Chalayan, as integral dimensions. 144

Curating in Design Museums

Figure 14.3 Paul Smith studio installation, Hello My Name is Paul Smith, Design Museum, London, 2013–14. Photograph: Helen Charman, courtesy of the Design Museum, London.

You can only go so far with an immersive experience – you can’t answer the question of the work’s significance. This is where the range of interpretive tools comes into play – introductory text, film footage – all these tools help the visitor come to a fuller understanding of the work (Curator A).

Conclusion It would be churlish to deny that curating design demonstrates a shared sensibility with the wider field of art curation. This sensibility is most interestingly apparent in relation to the turn towards more educational, collaborative and audience-aware approaches (O’Neill and Wilson 2010; Obrist 2008, 2014) and the characterization of curating as a propositional mode of enquiry (Rogoff 2010). The language of immersive, experiential design exhibitions provides a counterpoint to the notion of the white cube, but it nevertheless shares conceptual territory with approaches to fine art curating in which the exhibition is conceived as an overall experience rather than a series of individuated engagements with artworks (Manacorda quoted in Cooke 2006:32; Bourriaud 1998). However, whereas for contemporary art the notion of the exhibition as immersive experience is explained as a defensive curatorial strategy arising in response to changes in art practice and to museological pressures (Cooke 2006), the approach in design curating is grounded in the history of exhibition design and forms part of the historical ‘DNA’ of design. Coupled with the attention to context and process, it affords design curating some disciplinary co-ordinates that can inform a differentiated 145

Design Objects and the Museum

approach between art and design. Speaking on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking debate show, Director of the Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic (2014) suggested: There is a fundamental difference between looking at an object as a piece of design, and as a work of art. For us the purpose of a design museum is to explore how things are made, why they are made, who made them, who they are for, how they’re used . . . to actually reveal a process. These are things art steers away from – maybe curating has a different role in different parts of the cultural landscape? This chapter set out to cast a light on design curating through exploring the characteristics and approaches of professional practice articulated by exhibition curators and experienced by visitors at the Design Museum, London. The localized context is not representative of the wider field of approaches to design curating – for example, arguments made for the close alignment of curatorial approaches between design and science exhibitions (Jeppsson 2010). Nevertheless, in briefly considering the extent to which these approaches might be understood as differentiated by the disciplinary context of design, and identifying the driving principles of design curating in affording cultural value to design, revealing design process, and the role of the immersive environment as an intrinsic form of ‘stage set’ for displaying design objects, these reflections might support further research into curating contemporary design in the museum context. And what of the future of curating design? Given the substantive developments within the design industry towards service economies and digital manufacturing, curators will increasingly need to grapple with the question of how to communicate and engage audiences with the more intangible, conceptual and strategic dimensions of design. Research can then reach beyond this book’s eponymous ‘design objects’ in a continuation of the project to understand better an emergent and important field of curatorial practice.

Acknowledgements With utmost thanks to Deyan Sudjic, Nina Due, Donna Loveday, Alex Newson, Daniel Charny, Gemma Curtin.

Notes 1. The extent to which this vision was realized in practice is debatable. The Bauhaus was pragmatic and full of faction fighters whose practice may be located at different points across the art/industry interface. 2. The Design Museum and Kingston University run a well-established MA in Curating Contemporary Design. 3. Another precedent being MoMA’s series of Useful Objects exhibitions, which began in 1938 with a selection of contemporary utilitarian objects available for under five dollars (although objects retailing at those prices in the mid-twentieth century were likely to be considered ‘everyday luxuries’). 4. See: http://designmuseum.org/discoverdesign/.

References Anderson, C. (2012) Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. London: Random House Business Books. Benjamin, W. (2002) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (eds) (2002) (2nd edn), Art In Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 520–527).

146

Curating in Design Museums Black, G. (2005) The Engaging Museum: Developing Museums for Visitor Involvement. London: Routledge. Bourriaud, N. (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presse Du Reel. Charman, H. (2010) ‘The Productive Eye: Conceptualising Learning in the Design Museum’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London. Cooke, L. (2006) ‘In Lieu of Higher Ground’. In Marincola, P. (ed.), What Makes a Great Exhibition? Philadelphia, PA : Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (pp. 32–43). Curator comments. In Charman, H. ‘The Productive Eye: Conceptualising Learning in the Design Museum’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London. Ford, B. E. (2006) ‘A Champion of Individual Liberty: John Cotton Dana 1856–1929’. In Meecham, P. and Sheldon, J. (2009) Making American Art: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge (pp. 147–149). Forty, A. (2005) Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (2nd edn). London: Thames and Hudson. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2011) ‘Studying Visitors’. In Macdonald, S. (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies. Chichester: Blackwell (pp. 362–376). Hunt, J. (2008) ‘This is Tomorrow 1956–2006: Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Artists so Rich, so Successful?’. Available online: http://discreet-uk.com/state-of-art/ISSUE %20SEVEN /hunt-7.html (Accessed 20 April 2014). Jeppsson, F. (2010) In Case of Design: Inject Critical Thinking. Stockholm: Jeppsson. Lang, C., Reeve, J. and Woollard, V. (2006) The Responsive Museum. Hants: Ashgate. Meecham, P. and Sheldon, J. (2009) Making American Art: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Obrist, H. (2008) A Brief History of Curating. Zurich: JRP Ringier. Obrist, H. (2014) Ways of Curating. London: Allen Lane. O’Doherty. B. (2000) (Expanded Edition) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Oakland, CA : University of California Press. O’Neill, P. (2012) The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (eds) (2010) Curating and the Educational Turn. London: Open Editions; Amsterdam: de Appel. Rawsthorn, A. (2013) Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. London: Penguin. Rogoff, I. (2010) ‘Turning’. In O’Neill, P. and Wilson, M. (eds), Curating and the Educational Turn. London: Open Editions; Amsterdam: de Appel (pp. 40–41). Shklovsky, V. (1965) ‘Art as Technique’. In Lemon, L. T. and Reiss, M. J. (eds), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (pp. 3–24). Simon, N. (2010) The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA : Museum 2.0. Smith, T. (2012) Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International. Staniszewski, M. A. (1999) The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Sudjic, D. (2014) BBC Radio 3, Free Thinking, 27 March 2014. ‘Live at Southbank Centre: Contemporary Curating, World Thinkers, The Language of Peace’. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yqt1b (Accessed 22 June 2015). Visitor comments. In Charman, H. (2010) ‘The Productive Eye: Conceptualising Learning in the Design Museum’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London. Williams, G. (2010) ‘On the Problematic Relationship Between Institutions and Critical Design Thinking’. In Jeppsson, F. (ed.), In Case of Design: Inject Critical Thinking. Stockholm: Jeppsson.

147

148

CHAPTER 15 DESIGN AND MUSEUM INTERPRETATION: CONTEMPORARY CHARACTERISTICS AND PRACTICE Jason Cleverly

Introduction There are two sections to this chapter. First is a review of contemporary interpretative forms by artist and designers responding to themes, objects and collections held within art galleries and museums. In the second section I will discuss two examples of my own interpretive practice that are informed and resonate with this review. A limited survey of tropes has revealed three main approaches: Interpretive Artistic, Interpretive Didactic and Interpretive Situational.

SECTION ONE: INTERPRETIVE TROPES Interpretive Artistic An Interpretive Artistic approach is characterized by an individual artist’s interpretive response to a collection: a personal, conceptual and contextual interrogation of museum objects and related material. This approach can be seen in Grayson Perry’s 2011 exhibition The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman1 created through his engagement with objects at the British Museum. The nature of this engagement is perhaps captured quite neatly in the flyleaf of the accompanying book: ‘Do not look too hard for meaning here. I am not a historian I am an artist. That is all you need to know’ (Perry 2011). A precursor to Perry’s work with the British Museum is Philip Eglin’s 2001 exhibition Eglin at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) featuring his distinctive figurative ceramics.2 In an accompanying video, ‘Carving out a Future’,3 Eglin describes buying a catalogue of Northern Gothic sculpture from the V&A (Williamson 1988). In finding the catalogue, Eglin is drawn to the eleventh-century figurative woodcarvings featured, and investigates further. Discovering that the objects are in storage, Eglin gains access to the archived sculptures and continues his study. This process reveals the artist as a practice-based researcher and scholar. Eglin continues to evaluate and draw attention to particular features, such as the crudely finished back of the woodcarvings, revealing that they were once fixed in a church building. Clearly Elgin is fascinated by the original positioning of the pieces, and begins considering his connections with the artists. This also draws attention to the fact that the artefacts are no longer in their original context but are now museum acquisitions subject to taxonomical rigour. Once on show in the V&A, together the woodcarvings and ceramics animate each other, encouraging us to look again; although perhaps it is the eleventh century that wins out, having been rescued by Eglin from the museum stores. Paul Williamson neatly closes the circle by writing a review of the carvings including a reflection on Eglin’s responses.4 Eglin acknowledges growth in his knowledge and the expansion of his practice, and comments on the sharing of this with the exhibition visitor. This artistic version of scholarly activity resonates with my own 149

Design Objects and the Museum

practice, whereby through the close study of the themes and objects that are submitted to the interpretive process, one becomes affected and informed by the process. James Putnam describes the value of the growing use of artistic interventions by museums and art galleries as: Helping to break down the more formal standard classification system, and the frequent preoccupation with the self also works well in helping deconstruct the impersonal nature of museum displays . . . the increasing phenomenon of the artist curator often crosses the boundaries between exhibition design and installation and is regarded by some artists as a natural extension of their everyday practice (Putnam 2001:132). The enquiring impulses that drive the artist can often be similar to those of the scholar. However without being confined by the rigour of scholarly methodology, when allowed behind the scenes, the artist acknowledges this privilege and applies his or her own methods of enquiry. This freedom allows for more idiosyncratic connections to be made by the artist curator and, subsequently, the museum visitor. Turning the museum into a new kind of wunderkammer, an evocation of the early private museum, where proto-scientific collections of shells, minerals and curios were displayed to both taxonomic and aesthetic purpose.

Interpretive Didactic Interpretive Didactic initiatives range from audio guides, labelling and more complex interventions; these designed solutions are intended to enhance formal object-based museum learning. Generally these are not open-ended and have a restricted set of possible outcomes for the participants. Two interactive installations for the exhibition Constable: The Great Landscapes held at Tate Britain, 20065 were designed and developed by the design agency AllofUs.6 The first of these installations featured a large, wall-mounted video screen showing Constable’s painting View of the Stour near Dedham, 1822. As visitors moved into range of the image a camera senses their movement to reveal an X-ray view of the underpainting. The second installation features a digital simulation of Constable’s technique of ‘squaring up’, a copy of the oil sketch for Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, was positioned under a clear touch sensitive panel. The oil sketch was divided by a thread grid, touching sections of the grid revealed an image of the finished version of the painting on a large, wall-mounted screen. A study by the Work Interaction and Technology Research Group at King’s College London,7 discussed the design brief from the curator to the design team as intending to ‘foster an understanding amongst visitors: both those using the interactives, and importantly those merely witnessing their use’ (vom Lehn et  al. 2007:1486). Contingent discovery of functionality in an interactive is an invaluable tool for supporting their effectiveness, as visitors help each other to navigate use. Two fundamental differences were noted in the operational interaction with the two installations. First, the X-ray interactive installation worked as visitors entered into its range and often relied on the visitors noticing their influence on the image. The second interactive relied on a deliberate touching of the squared-up panel to elicit interaction. The understanding and deployment of these affordances may be both cognitively developed and involve the intuitive, tacit skills of a designer. However, design for interaction must also rely on careful planning and collaboration, as much as it does on unacknowledged ‘givens’, chance or hunches. Experienced designers of interactive interpretation take their orders from their clients and are also aware of the subtleties of audience behaviour, but the results of previous success and failure may or may not have been shared. Most publicly funded exhibits require an evaluation, however the process of interactive exhibit evaluation is complex. A recent paper published by the Visitor Studies Group at King’s College London, discusses this problem: 150

Design and Museum Interpretation

‘Content’ associated with particular types of ‘interactive’ will vary significantly, and the content rather than the forms of ‘interaction’ the device or display provides, will have a profound impact on the experience of visitors. To make matters more difficult still, the location of the interactive within a gallery of objects, or other interactives, will bear not only upon its use but also on its effect on the visitor’s engagement within other exhibits in the same gallery. Despite the wide-ranging corpus of evaluation reports that address interactives many important questions remain unaddressed and there is a necessity to identify some key distinctions to enable comparative analysis to be undertaken (Heath and Davies 2014:54).

Interpretive Situational The Interpretive Situational is the conflation of artistic and didactic interpretation; the artist designer in this case pays particular attention to the situational aesthetic sensitivities of the design employed, and to a combined educational and curatorial agenda. And has open-ended contributory visitor content. Examples of this can range from artist-directed workshop activities that form a finished installation or exhibition, to sited interactives that autonomously capture visitor responses. Artist-directed Interpretive Situational Cathy Miles8 is a contemporary maker working in wire to create figurative sculpture. In 2010 Miles was selected as part of the Museumaker Initiative9 to work with The Guildhall Museum Rochester.10 As a focus for the project, the museum identified the Seaton Tool Chest, a unique and significant object that contained a complete set of eighteenth-century woodworking tools. The project, titled Toolshed, brought together tools created by the maker Miles, alongside a special display of the Seaton Tool Chest. Wire and mixed media tools created during the community engagement workshops were exhibited in a shed-like structure. An evaluation of the project (Jackson 2011) revealed many positive reflections. For example, a curator at the museum identified as ‘Peter’ is quoted: ‘It is a brilliant collection. Makers look at things in totally different ways. They can make very important linkages between disparate objects which we might not see as curators. Makers act as a conduit between the museum and the public’ (Jackson 2011:4). The report goes on to demonstrate through a participant questionnaire how respondents felt that the Museum was more ‘approachable’ and that they would have more contact with the Museum because of their involvement. A respondent reported: ‘it makes the children understand more about the skills involved and makes the exhibition more relevant’ (Jackson 2011:7). The workshop-based approach, by directly engaging participants clearly and directly with collections, allows for physical and aesthetic choices to be played out and rendered relevant. This kind of approach can be seen as creating the opportunity for active participation and may be a powerful tool for generating and reinforcing memories. As Falk and Dierking discuss in their key text The Museum Experience, ‘Memory emerges as an important ingredient in the phenomenon of learning’ (1992:108). They go on to consider the physical context of recollections of visitor experiences, and charmingly describe how: ‘Many children’s recollections of field trips to zoos, farms, and nature centres include memories of smells, heat, or physical discomfort, such as mosquitoes, getting their feet wet, or getting muddy’ (Falk and Dierking 1992:121). Clearly kinaesthetic learning may be supported by activities that require a physical task in a museum setting. This, coupled with other requirements contained with the task such as aesthetic choices and social interaction, may enhance the event and contribute to the learning experience. 151

Design Objects and the Museum

Sited interactive Interpretive Situational The Wedgwood Virtual Portrait Medallion is a wall mounted-digital interactive, part of the Wedgwood Museum, Barleston, Staffordshire.11 Designed by the digital design agency Keepthinking.12 The Wedgwood Museum entices visitors with the following: ‘The great and the good have all been immortalised by Wedgwood on one of their iconic jasper portrait medallions. Visitors to the museum have the opportunity to join this illustrious group through our Virtual Portrait Medallion interactive.’13 The virtual medallion allows the visitor to create a self-portrait by aligning their face to a screen; a filter gives a cameo effect to the image. The visitor is able to save their selection and subsequently navigate via the museum’s website to review and download their creation. This aspect of functionality was a significant consideration for my practice as it demonstrated the possibility of networking an interactive and informed the concept of the Dr Johnson Project outlined below. Although the Virtual Portrait Medallion is relatively simple in concept and requires its users to position themselves in the attitude of a neoclassical subject (a head and shoulder side profile, making use of the decorative oval frame and the curved cropping at shoulder level), a visit to the website reveals some unorthodox poses (common gestures include the ‘Vs Up’, single finger gesture, moose ears and the traditional stuck-out tongue). This subversion of use is a feature of these kinds of open-ended interactives.

SECTION 2: INTERPRETIVE PRACTICE Interactive worktable and escritoire, 2009 The House of Words exhibition was held in summer 2009, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Dr Johnson’s birthday, at Dr Johnson’s House, London. Invited to contribute to the exhibition, I was determined to develop an interactive about language, words and definitions. For this installation, and in order to evoke a sense of purpose and locatedness, I built a playful, imagined recreation of Johnson’s furniture: a table, an escritoire, book and inkwell to be positioned in the garret room where the dictionary had been originally compiled. According to my research into the process of dictionary making, Johnson worked on large trestle tables covered in paper notes, words and definitions. These definitions were brought to the garret by helpers called amanuensis, and ‘the garret at Gough Square was not so much a counting house as an assembly line’ (Hitchings 2006:81). This image of a place that was at the centre of things, used for the compiling and collation of words and definitions, was suggestive of a kind of search engine, a repository. I proposed a contributory online dictionary that could only be used in the garret room. With proper technical support and a new collaborative partner, Tim Shear, who was able to create the interface and capture the visitors’ words, this was an opportunity to create a participatory contributory and networked interactive that would solve a problem that I had previously encountered, the transitory ephemerality of interactive works. For the visual characteristics and to further suggest the eighteenth century, I referenced Thomas Chippendale’s catalogue of furniture styles, The Gentleman and Cabinet Makers Director (Chippendale and Chippendale Society [1754] 2000), which contains clear black and white images with evocative crosshatchings and stylized perspective qualities. I was also granted permission to use high-resolution images of Johnson’s original correction notes from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.14 These were laser etched onto the table surface forming a scattered trompe l’oeil pattern, which visually suggested the dictionary making process.

152

Design and Museum Interpretation

Figure 15.1 Interactive Worktable and Escritoire, Dr Johnson’s House, 2009. Photograph: Jason Cleverly.

Using a commercially available digital pen that could translate handwriting into text-based data, the visitor was encouraged through written instructions to add words of their own devising, or to write idiosyncratic definitions of existing words to add to a collaborative online dictionary. The response to this project can be seen on a dedicated microsite, which archives and preserves a record of the installation’s life span in the ‘ecology’ of the garret, and is some measure of the success of this novel approach to interpretation.15 In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, one of the curators, Tessa Peters, writes: Cleverly’s interactive experience is an acknowledgement of how language evolves and expands, not least because of new and changing definitions which continue to emerge from ‘the street’, from the sphere of new technology and so forth. He also points to how authoritative print-based dictionaries and comparable works of reference now compete with search engines and databases such as Wikipedia (Peters 2009:46). There were a number of technical and curatorial concerns with this work, a description of which can be found in the book chapter ‘Designing Collaboration: Evoking Dr. Johnson through Craft and Interdisciplinarity’ (Cleverly and Shear 2013). The experience of developing and making work of this complexity could only come about through collaboration, which is something I had not encountered before, having preferred to deal with all aspects of concept design and technology independently. To accept a degree of trust and sharing of ownership was easier than I had imagined, particularly as the work was clearly in many ways more successful 153

Design Objects and the Museum

than previous works. This acceptance of a more collaborative way of working marked a new phase for my practice. In ‘Four steps in the History of Museum Technologies and Visitors’ Digital Participation’, Jørgen Riber Christensen reviews the project and contends that: The digital technology used here is exceptionally and exemplarily user-friendly, and it allows the visitor to become a co-author to such an extent that his or her part of the exhibited work is distributed and published to the whole world. With the help of digital exhibition technology, the museum audience is involved in the formation of the meaning of the exhibited object. This form of museum participation makes it possible for the exhibited object to be up-dated to the present, so that A Dictionary of the English Language and the museum, Dr. Johnson’s House from the Age of Enlightenment, are made relevant to our time, so that the museum visit is both engaging and a source of experience and insight at the same time (Christensen 2011:23–24). This response established that there was strong potential for more works of this kind and that they may now be contemplated, particularly in regard to the possibilities for the way new technologies can sensitively be combined with a commitment to the physical. A more mixed review of the project, by Helen Carnac in the Journal of Modern Craft, was approving of the concept as it dealt with the idea of language, but lacked a ‘finer consideration of craft’ (Carnac 2010:256). This response revealed something of the complexity of the projects, as the technical and physical demands of the Interactive Worktable Table and Escritoire project meant that the making and finish was of a lesser consideration. My objective was to create a balance between my own making skills with the concept and function of an object of this nature. Looking back on the project, my own critique rests on the resolution of the surface pattern. I had intended the piece to clearly signal its status as a ‘stage prop’, a stylized version of eighteenth-century furniture. This ambition was changed by the decision to use a brown stain on the wood, perhaps creating the impression that I was attempting to make a faithful reproduction. Indeed a review for Crafts magazine by Maeve Hosea comments: ‘On first glance the beautiful hardwood table does not look out of place in the Georgian interior’ (Hosea 2009).

The Enlightened Eye, 2014 Part of the mining heritage gallery at Liskeard and District Museum, The Enlightened Eye is, at the time of writing, a newly installed museum interactive, designed to enhance visitor experience of mineral specimens.16 The Enlightened Eye supports a system of planetary gears, allowing mineral samples to be examined sequentially by a digital microscope. Using a touch screen and a specially designed interface, visitors can annotate and select close up views to make unique responses that can be shared online. The seemingly archaic technology and the kinetic machine styling are an evocation of the camera obscura and the orrery. The manual controls are positioned to encourage visitors to co-operate, engender collaboration and enhance participation. These considerations conform to a programme of aesthetic design and affordance, aimed to support memorable interactions and meaning making. The invitation to participate in a drawing exercise was conceived in part to give the visitor an idea of the taxonomic process of closely observing mineral samples, to allow a playful performative re-enactment of a scholarly practice and enhance connection with the objects under scrutiny. Creating visual associations with the selected mineral samples highlights the comparative morphologies prompted by chance natural formations, which are seen as drivers of human creativity; since early times the arrangement of stars, cloud structures and very aptly rock formations have 154

Design and Museum Interpretation

Figure 15.2 The Enlightened Eye, Liskeard and District Museum, 2014. Photograph: Jason Cleverly.

often inspired image making. The tracing of images on the digital tablet supports visitors in the choices they make and forms a reassuring template for undertaking a drawing in a public space. This exhibit brings together many of my preoccupations, and as it begins to be used by visitors I will now start to evaluate effectiveness of the design and aesthetic choices made.

Conclusions With reverence and irreverence, the artists Eglin and Perry explore objects for us, making physical responses to objects and initiating films, books, drawings, websites and other indications of close and detailed study, much like their curatorial counterparts. The work of interactive designers can treat didactic interpretation in subtle and interesting ways but it is not always easy to judge what the visitor will do. Artist-led workshops appear to be successful in their open-ended production of active creativity, which enhances visitor participation and interpretation. Sited situational interactives can allow for creative but unintended responses and so need controls, such as visual clues for the user. Audiences respond to different types of pleasure in response to objects. Artist-designers can use their aesthetic values and approaches heuristically to evoke responses. 155

Design Objects and the Museum

Figure 15.3 Annotated mineral image made on The Enlightened Eye, Liskeard and District Museum, 2014. Photograph: Jason Cleverly.

Designing a multifaceted, multi-modal structure (an assembly to be sited in a public place with a mixed agenda) such as The Enlightened Eye, generates conflicting positions; a responsibility to curatorial procedure, to visitor amusement and interaction, and the self-indulgent aesthetic and technical predilections of the artistdesigner. Anne Lorimer has identified a threat to the more unconventional museum interactives in ‘Raising Spectres: Welcoming Hybrid Phantoms’. She reports that a common fear amongst museum exhibit designers is ‘that aesthetic forms, instead of acting as a transparent conduit or facilitating vehicle for underlying concepts, will steal the show: that exhibit creators, exhibit forms or exhibit receivers will fail to act in a semiotically disciplined manner’ (Lorimer 2007:214). Lorimer contends that ‘the exhibit becomes about exhibit technology and its aesthetic qualities’. However, she is not against new forms of exhibit but argues that, ‘exhibits should be evaluated as experiments’ (2007:215). These experiments should be about producing new knowledge rather than simply communicating what we already know. If the museum is increasingly a place for experience, as well as education for an inquisitive, interested and digitally literate audience, then it is an ideal testing ground for new initiatives that might satisfy both the visitor and the experimental artist-designer. 156

Design and Museum Interpretation

Acknowledgements Thanks to Tim Shear, Anna Monks, Katherine Nicholls and Phineas Cleverly.

Notes 1. Grayson Perry The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. British Museum (2012). Available online: http://www. britishmuseum.org/whats_on/past_exhibitions/2012/grayson_perry.aspx (Accessed 4 March 2014). 2. ‘Eglin at the V&A’. Philip Eglin microsite (2001). Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/eglin (Accessed 4 March 2014). 3. ‘Carving Out a Future – Victoria and Albert Museum’ (2001). Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/ videos/p/video-phil-eglin-carving-out-a-future (Accessed 4 March 2014). 4. ‘Eglin at the V&A’ (2001). Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/eglin/edn (Accessed 4 March 2014). 5. Constable: The Great Landscapes. Tate. Available online: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/ constable-great-landscapes (Accessed 4 March 2014). 6. ‘Tate Britain: Constable Exhibition’. AllofUs. Available online: http://www.allofus.com/work/tate-britain/ constable-exhibition (Accessed 4 October 2014). 7. ‘Work, Interaction and Technology’. King’s College London. Available online: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/ management/research/wit/index.aspx (Accessed 9 May 2013). 8. ‘Cathy Miles’. Available online: http://cathymiles.blogspot.co.uk/ (Accessed 4 April 2014). 9. ‘Museumaker’. Arts Council. Available online: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/funded-projects/case-studies/ museumaker (Accessed 4 April 2014). 10. Guildhall Museum. Available online: http://www.medway.gov.uk/leisurecultureandsport/localhistoryandarchives/ museums/guildhallmuseum.aspx (Accessed 4 April 2014). 11. ‘Wedgwood Virtual Portrait Medallion’. Wedgwood Museum. Available online: http://www.wedgwoodmuseum.org. uk/visit/virtual-portrait-medallion (Accessed 4 April 2014). 12. ‘Content/Collection Management System & Digital Design for Museums | London & New York | About’. Keepthinking. Available online: http://www.keepthinking.it/about (Accessed 4 April 2014). 13. ‘The Wedgwood Museum – Visit – Virtual Portrait Medallion’. Wedgwood Museum. Available online: http://www. wedgwoodmuseum.org.uk/visit/virtual-portrait-medallion (Accessed 4 April 2014). 14. ‘Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary’. Yale University. Available online: http://drjohnsonsdictionary.library.yale.edu/ (Accessed 4 January 2014). 15. ‘Home Page | Dr Johnson’s Garret’. Dr. Johnson’s House. Available online: http://www.drjohnsonsgarret.net/ (Accessed 4 January 2014). 16. ‘Recent Pictures | The Enlightened Eye’. Liskeard and District Museum. Available online: http://enlightened-eye.com/ (Accessed 10 March 2014).

References Carnac, H. (2010) ‘Exhibition Review. The House of Words’. Journal of Modern Craft, 3(2), 253–256. Chippendale, Thomas and Chippendale Society ([1754] 2000) Third Revised Edition. The Gentleman and Cabinet Makers Director. New York: Dover Publications Inc. Christensen, J. R. (2011) ‘Four Steps in the History of Museum Technologies and Visitors’ Digital Participation’. Journal of Media and Communication Research. Available online: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/mediekultur/article/ view/2982 (Accessed 4 January 2014).

157

Design Objects and the Museum Cleverly, J. and Shear, T. (2013) ‘Designing Collaboration: Evoking Dr. Johnson through Craft and Interdisciplinarity’. In Felcey, H., Ravetz, A. and Kettle, A. (eds), Collaboration through Craft. London: Bloomsbury (pp. 100–113). Falk, J. H. and Dierking, L. D. (1992) Museum Experience. Washington, DC : Whalesback Books. Heath, C. and Davies, M. (2014) ‘Evaluating Evaluation Report’. King’s College London. Available online: http://visitors. org.uk/files/Evaluation_Evaluation_Report.pdf (Accessed 5 February 2014). Hitchings, H. (2006) Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World. London: John Murray. Hosea, M. (2009) ‘The House of Words Reviews’. Crafts. Available online: http://www.janeprophet.com/wp-content/ uploads/2011/09/craftscouncil.org_.uk-The_House_of_Words__Reviews__Crafts_Magazine__Crafts_Council.pdf. (Accessed 5 May 2014). Jackson, A. (2011) Museumaker Evaluation Report Guildhall Museum. Bath: Annabel Jackson Associates Limited. Lorimer, A. (2007) ‘Raising Spectres: Welcoming Hybrid Phantoms’. In Macdonald, S. and Basu, P. (eds), Exhibition Experiments. Oxford: Blackwell (pp. 197–218). Perry, G. (2011) The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. London: British Museum. Peters, T. (2009) ‘The Dictionary Garret’. In Peters, T. and West, J. (eds), The House of Words. London: Dr Johnson’s House Trust. Putnam, J. (2001) Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. London: Thames and Hudson. Vom Lehn, D., Hindmarsh, J., Luff, P. and Heath, C. (2007) Work Interaction and Technology Research Group. King’s College London. Available online: http://www.vom-lehn.net/Dirk_vom_Lehn/Museums_&_Technology_files/ p1485-vomlehn-CHI 2007-Constable.pdf (Accessed 4 March 2014). Williamson, P. (1988) Northern Gothic Sculpture: 1200–1450. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.

158

CHAPTER 16 INTERACTIONS IN THE MUSEUM: DESIGN CULTURE SALONS AT THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM Leah Armstrong and Guy Julier

Introduction The remarkable ascendance of design over the past three decades has been met by its extension into novel forms of creative practice that engage with ever widening audiences, employ more complex technological constellations and innovate new functions and meanings. Design has moved beyond its traditional formats of industrial production, graphic communication or interior architecture, where the emphasis was laid on the material, visual or spatial outcome. While these sectors continue, design is also central to the globalization of manufacture, the digital technological revolution, the blurring of distinctions between high volume and batch production, the growth of service, experience and brand-driven economies and strategic responses to pressing environmental, social and policy challenges. Accordingly, it has also adopted new roles where its significance is less determined through the outward appearance of finished artefacts and more through its processes.1 Often, there is less to see and more to talk about. These shifts present considerable challenges for museums that deal with contemporary design and technology. How would the founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Henry Cole, have responded to social media and digital interactive tools? What might he have done to represent multi-platform services such as bike sharing systems? How would he have raised debate around 3D printing or the sweatshop manufacture of luxury goods? As discourse on design has matured and specialisms developed, what might he have done to bring academic, professional and ‘lay’ interests together? Since November 2012, the V&A has hosted three seasons of Design Culture Salons. Founded by Guy Julier and held on weekday evenings, they provide an opportunity for members of the public to participate in a conversation led by the insights of a different panel of academics, design practitioners and other experts for each event. They take place on a modest scale, supported by the University of Brighton and the V&A Learning and Research Departments. Nevertheless, they have attracted a regular following, indicating the participative role the museum can play in inspiring thought and instigating conversation on a range of contemporary design issues. The museum is principally known for its display of objects. However, its seminars, lectures and workshops are also essential means of engaging audiences and promoting the education of design. The imperative to do so has been further enhanced by the turn towards new ways of thinking about design beyond the singularized object. As a strategizing tool, design cannot always be neatly captured in the vitrine and its evaluation does not always very easily give itself over to visual encounter alone. The latter can no longer accommodate the wider cognitive and discursive faculties design demands today. The presentation of the design object as an immutable ‘fact’ has had to be challenged and new formats for it need to be consolidated. Providing a neat summary of this predicament in the museum, the first Design Culture Salon opened on the same night as the V&A’s Dr Susan Weber Gallery, which tells the story of furniture design and production over 600 years. Here, two faces of the museum – object-based and conversational – were on show. Guy Julier remarked upon this contrast: 159

Design Objects and the Museum

Asymmetrically placed, the main entrance welcomed loyal museum friends with a flourish, while participants in this Salon snuck in through the Exhibition Road tunnel. The front end of the museum was concerned with, let’s say, the more permanent role of galleries and collections, while we, in the Sackler Centre at the back of the museum were discussing change, dynamics, fluidity, the immaterial and delirium (Julier 2013b). This distinction points to new possibilities in the museum that sit alongside object-centred study of design. The Design Culture Salons pose an opportunity to pull these possibilities into the museum. It seems certain that both faces are integral to the representation of design in the contemporary museum, but finding a way to manage their co-existence and interaction proves challenging. The notion of interactivity is now well embedded as a trope in Museum Studies. However, as Smuts states, ‘while everyone has something to say about interactivity, no one seems to have a clear understanding of what makes something interactive’ (Smuts 2009). Most museums offer ‘interactives’: tools through which visitors can engage with the collection digitally, though there is debate as to how this interactivity is measured (Heath and vom Lehn 2008). Digital media now occupies a prominent position in the museum’s overall strategy, both in relation to brand management and public engagement. However, in this chapter, we look at how the Design Culture Salons might be considered ‘interactive tools’ alongside these technological fixes, by arguing that they are responsive and reflexive.

Figure 16.1 Design Culture Salon 15: How does design address immobilities in our society? Panel, left to right: Dr Ana Carden-Coyne, Carmen Papalia, James Stewart, Dr Graham Pullin, Alison Thompson and Professor Rob Imrie, V&A, 13.3.2015. Photograph: Guy Julier and Leah Armstrong.

160

Design Culture Salons at the V&A Museum, London

The Design Culture Salons are only one example of a wide variety of projects through which the V&A has demonstrated commitment to the role of the museum as a civic institution and some of these will be signposted in this chapter.2 While aspects of these shifting dynamics of design are novel, this chapter also presents the Salons as a recent manifestation within a much longer historical view of the museum as a site for civic engagement. In this sense, the Salons can be seen to encapsulate the historical claims about the function and role of public institutions that were instigated by Henry Cole. This chapter is divided into four sections. First, it explains the origins of the Design Culture Salons, with reference to the history of salon culture, highlighting the main aims and purpose of a salon as a forum for debate. Second, it considers the situation of the Design Culture Salons in the V&A alongside a range of other activities, which indicate attempts to be reflexive and responsive to social concerns. The third and fourth sections take into consideration the language and content of the Salons and highlight some of the key themes to have emerged so far.

Salon culture To put the Design Culture Salons in a wider perspective, salon culture has historically been implicated in discussions about the shape and structure of the public sphere. The salons of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution functioned as networks of social and intellectual exchange and form a persistent motif in the historiography of this era (Kale 2002). For Jurgen Habermas, salons were one tool, alongside journalism, reading societies and coffee houses, deployed by the bourgeois elite in the late-eighteenth century to carve out the public sphere (Habermas 1991). Though the word may be French in origin, British political culture in the eighteenth century was similarly enlivened by public salon debates, shared between enlightened men, in London, over issues of social and political concern (Andrew 1994). Public institutions of art and design, including museums and galleries, have also evolved through a strong spirit of reformative zeal, led by the debates of committees and groups, voluntary and governmental (Woodham 1996). Indeed, this ethos also underpinned the establishment of some of the first art schools in Britain, such as the Liverpool Mechanics’ School of Art, founded in 1825. As Charles Saumarez Smith argues, ‘the transformation of institutions of public culture from haphazard and rather amateurish to well organised institutions with a strong sense of social mission’ were partly due to the efforts of individuals such as Henry Cole, but also a broad range of liberally minded pressure groups, such as the Philosophical Radicals (Saumarez Smith 2010). Thus, for a practice historically concerned with the production and consumption of objects, the history of design has, since the mid-nineteenth century, been punctuated, animated and driven by debate, discussion and conversation. Design discourse has also historically been shaped by shifting attitudes to the term ‘public’ (LeMahieu 1988). The aim of ‘making things public’ (Latour 2005) (a concept we shall return to) can be seen as a motivating factor behind Cole’s actions in setting up both the Government School for Design in 1831 and the V&A in 1853. Cole was, among other things, an active committeeman and drove discussions and debates that were to frame the promotion of design, art, science and education in the early twentieth century (Bonython and Burton 2003). In his first V&A Annual Report to the Board of Trade in 1853, Cole emphasized the educative function of the museum: ‘If [the museum] be connected with lectures and means are taken to point out its uses and applications, it becomes elevated from being a mere unintelligible lounge for idlers into an impressive schoolroom for everyone’ (quoted in Hooper-Greenhill 2007:196). With this in mind, it is significant that the Design Culture Salons form part of the programme of the V&A Learning department, which in 2013 brought 200,000 people into the museum as participants in a 161

Design Objects and the Museum

programme of activities that included the National Art and Design Saturday Clubs for children and Introducing Costume Design for Ex-Prisoners (V&A Annual Report 2013:5–6). Outside the V&A, a number of public salons have helped to cultivate an interest and familiarity with the salon format. This includes the Urban Salon in London, which began in 2007. Curated by sociologists and geographers, it functions as a ‘seminar-series aimed at scholars, artists, practitioners and others exploring urban experiences with an international and comparative frame’ (theurbansalon.org). Reading material is circulated before the salon to provoke conversations, but it remains committed to an ‘informal and open’ format. Values of transparency can therefore be seen to govern salon culture.3 Previous topics have included public housing, gentrification, smart cities and speculative urbanisms, addressing systemic shifts within a culture of speculation. In Leeds too, a regular salon takes place to debate contemporary political, cultural and scientific issues (leedssalon.org.uk). Founded in 2009, by Michele Ledda and Paul Thomas, the Leeds salon is inspired by similar initiatives, including the Institute of Ideas (IoI).4 A number of museums and galleries also hold salon events as part of their education and public engagement programme. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA ) and Whitechapel Gallery, London, both hold salons on a regular basis. The ICA holds the regular Friday Salon to provide a space for experimenting with ideas and exploring topics that may be, but are not necessarily, connected to the broader exhibition programme. It attracts a regular following from those who want to engage with the gallery on this level. For Sumitra Upham, Curator of Education at the ICA , the word salon suggests something ‘informal, communal and in dialogue with political and social issues’ (Upham 2014). In addition to transparency, salon culture can therefore also be described as responsive and dynamic, fluid and engaged. There is no time limit to the salons at the ICA , which often run over two or three hours. Internationally too, public libraries, museums and galleries have explored the capacities of salon culture as a means of capturing public debate. The Research and Development department at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) hosts regular salons programmed on a wide variety of topics, which create a space within the museum to consider and engage with its wider cultural context. The aim here, through this discussion and exploration, is to develop an understanding of the transformative capacity of the museum in contemporary society. In this sense, the salons are future-oriented, seeking to generate and innovate new ideas (Rezende 2014). In 2008, the New York Public Library held a series of weeknight discussions, presenting the library as a site of cultural production and the interaction between librarians and the public as a form of conversation (Gluibizzi 2008). Here, researchers, librarians and academics act as intermediaries and facilitators, rather than gatekeepers, within these sites of public engagement. Digital media platforms constitute another important intermediary in this context. Twitter, for instance, is widely recognized as an important public forum through which public debates can coalesce. The digitization of expert-led debates, seminars and conferences, through podcasts, online videos and films, has shaped and invigorated new capacities for public debate. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is the TED Talk (ted.com/talks).5 This digitized lecture series has achieved mass success in its commitment to ‘ideas worth spreading’. At the time of writing, there are now over 1,600 TED Talk videos online, which have collectively over one billion global viewers. While the reach and circulation of this material is therefore not under any doubt, recent commentators have called into question its impact, particularly in relation to its claims to innovation and change (Bratton 2013; Morozov 2013). Sociologists and anthropologists are increasingly questioning the public function of Twitter and other social media forums for similar reasons (Bohman 2004; Coleman 2010). Viewed in this context, the Design Culture Salons defend the value of live, participative debate.6 Although they are promoted online and summarized on the salon’s blog, the only way of participating is to physically come to the museum. 162

Design Culture Salons at the V&A Museum, London

Salon interactions Table 16.1 Summary of the topics of debate at the first three series of the Design Culture Salons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

What can museums do with contemporary design? Is making stuff back on the agenda? Design Activism: How does it change things? How does design function in a recession? How does design produce new publics? How do new food systems impact on our towns and cities? Transparent Design: What does it mean? How has digital technology changed the dynamics of the designer start-up? What are the gender politics of contemporary design practice? How is the urban mobile citizen designed? How do fashion cycles and design culture interact? Is innovation overrated and what is the role of design here? How does age influence cultures of design? How dependent is the design profession on cultures of migration? How does design address immobilities in our society? What does design do for citizenship in the age of the consumer?

27 November 2012 29 January 2013 26 February 2013 26 March 2013 30 April 2013 13 December 2013 10 January 2014 7 February 2014 7 March 2014 10 October 2014 14 November 2014 12 December 2014 9 January 2015 20 February 2015 13 March 2015 10 April 2015

Table 16.1 summarizes the debates at the Design Culture Salons in the first three series. While these topics address a wide spectrum of issues in contemporary design culture, they also converge on some central themes. The purpose of this section is not to repeat the outcomes of the panel discussions, but to reflect on these points of convergence and to speculate on what this might reveal about the arrangement of design culture in the museum and its future orientation. Many of the Design Culture Salon discussions became fixed on the temporal dimensions of design practice, questioning the speed at which circuits and processes of design move and interact. Much of this dealt with tensions around time compressions in design. In Salon 8, Jonathan Sapsed referenced Manuel Castells’ notion of ‘timeless time’ in discussing the shifting dynamics of design start-ups (Castells 2009). Some Salon conversations also criticized the rhetoric of design promotion that has continuously proposed ‘quick-fix’ methods by which design can ‘solve problems’ (Design Culture Salon 4). As Liz Farrelly pointed out, much of the language at the Salons was about ‘putting time back into the design process’ (Design Culture Salon 8). In this way, the Design Culture Salons have acted as a space in which to slow down design rhetoric and to think more critically about its constituent elements. The conversations often start from a position of ‘deliberate uncertainty’, in contrast with expert-led seminars or lectures in which the speaker has generally arrived at a conclusion or an end-point before they begin to speak.7 The purpose of a Salon is to be more generative and fluid than this. The centrality of audience participation within the Salon structure also takes the focus away from ‘experts’ and disrupts didacticism within the museum. The questions, comments and provocations presented through Salon discussions not only direct the conversation, but inspire topics for future Salons.8 Through this participative interaction, the museum itself becomes an audience (Julier 2013b). The Design Culture Salons are configured in reaction to ongoing debates in contemporary culture. It is notable, for instance, that the first series responded in part to the conditions of the economic crisis, triggering questions around the function of design in a recession and the concept of ‘making’.9 The second series looked towards the possibilities of growth and new beginnings, through urban agriculture and digital design startups. Experts were invited to speak on these topics from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, 163

Design Objects and the Museum

including curators, academics, community workers and designers. The Salon discussions therefore enable a variety of responses to these issues. In this sense, they access broader social concerns through design research (Frayling 1993; Archer 1995; Van de Weijer, Van Cleempoel and Heynen 2014). While some of these include networks already identified through the museum’s main curatorial activities, it also means drawing new lines of connection to other institutions and practices. The Salon discussions take place without the support (or interference) of objects. PowerPoint presentations that often lapse into promotional pitches of design work or didactic lectures are avoided. Panellists are asked to prepare a short response to the evening’s question and not to rely on visual props or presentations. In so doing, the Salons shift from approaching design as involving ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004b). How do we consider the effects of recession on design culture without talking about them? Can the gender politics of contemporary design be properly explored silently? In his essay ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, Bruno Latour promoted the idea that political controversies coalesce around specific material issues and challenges (Latour 2004a). However, at the same time, he argues against a supposed neutrality of objects as facts. Instead, they are mutable and variegated, just as ideas are. Politics are performed through and around a coming together – or a gathering, in a Heideggerian sense – of things and people (Heidegger 2009:250–252); they involve assembly (Latour 2005). This presentation of design as a conversation is also indicative of a pivotal shift in the understanding and representation of design in contemporary culture. Literature that deals with the circulation of information systems and discourse around the object is now well advanced (Lash and Urry 1994; Lash 2002; Lash and Lury 2007). A major purpose of the Salons was to embrace the work of sociologists and academics who have produced these theoretical tools for studying and researching through design. Of those panellists and participants who identified themselves as practising designers, the majority could be described as working with design as a ‘problem-processing’ rather than ‘problem-solving’ activity (Julier 2013a:5). The language of design is now increasingly attuned to social science, anthropology and other research fields. Rather than talking about objects and materials, participants were keen to talk about the provision of relationships, structures and values. This is an interesting turn both in how design is practised and how it sees itself as a profession. The Salons thus provide the opportunity for this new mode of practice and thinking about design to be exhibited and performed. It enables the museum to take part in conversations, but also to showcase these conversations as a new form of design enquiry and practice.

The V&A as a site of interaction The extent to which objects in the museum are presented as ‘matters of fact’ or as ‘matters of concern’ sits at the core of contemporary questions in design museum curatorship (Latour 2004b). In the former case, the object is shown to ‘speak for itself ’, to engage the individual gaze, demand transaction between viewer and viewed through which their ‘truth’ is revealed. In the latter, the object is opened out, revealed and destabilized in all its multifarious functions, re-contextualizations and readings. There are other ways of bringing this into the museum. The collecting strategy of the V&A’s Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team shows that it is possible to trigger similar kinds of conversations through an object-based approach. This team has adopted a ‘rapid-response’ acquisitions strategy, which means that the team collect objects as their significance emerges, to respond quickly to new shifts in design and technology. The team’s head, Kieran Long, has explained that a major benefit of this strategy is that it can be fully documented with supporting information, such as an interview with the maker and detail on why the object is significant ‘at that moment’ (Long 2013; quoted in V&A Board of Trade Minutes 2013). Objects 164

Design Culture Salons at the V&A Museum, London

collected so far include: a pair of Primark branded trousers associated with the collapse of the Plaza factory in Bangladesh in 2013; the first 3D-printed gun; and a pair of Katy Perry’s false eyelashes. These acquisitions form powerful examples of how the museum can capture and engage with important social realities about the manufacture, distribution and mediation of design through the object. The 2011–2015 V&A Strategic Plan developed the social dimension of the museum, stating: ‘The V&A sees its work against a background of the political, social and ethical issues of today. In 2014–15, the Museum will provide a platform for debate about design, architecture and manufacturing . . . [It will] develop research into how design intersects with the public realm and what the responsibilities of the museum are as a civic institution’ (V&A Strategic Plan 2011–2015). As V&A Director, Martin Roth, put it, the museum now works under the ideal that ‘what happens to the world happens to the museum’ (Roth 2014 in V&A Podcast 1:16). In a manifesto style document, co-authored with Roth, Long described the museum as an ‘agora: a space for the public to encounter itself ’ (Long et al. 2013). The Friday Late programme, which has been running since 1999, presents additional evidence of the V&A as a site for new encounters and public interactions. The evening programme, curated by the Contemporary Team, is held on the last Friday evening of every month and aims to engage new audiences with the museum’s collections through inspiration and provocation. From 2013 to 2014, it featured four ‘take-over’ events at which creative communities from London’s Dalston, Hackney Wick, Tottenham and Peckham areas performed a range of creative practices relating to art, design, music and film. Fiona Cameron has identified museums as spaces of trust in the community, thereby having the potential to open debates up to other points of view, beyond mainstream positions (Cameron 2011). The activities of the Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team and the Design Culture Salons help the V&A to realize these capacities. Both initiatives are transparent in stating their curatorial and educational aims. They are reflexive in that they are engaged in ongoing adaptation and refinement that takes into account shifting developments in design and in the discourse around them.

Conclusion The arrangement, curation and performance of contemporary design in the museum should be constantly changing, just as definitions of design and the design profession are in an ‘endless state of becoming’ (Julier 2013a:246). This chapter has argued that the activities of the Design Culture Salon can be read as one recent manifestation of this shift, alongside a number of other engagement strategies relating to the collection of objects and the circulation of ideas around the object. In this sense, salon culture sits in an interesting position alongside the development of digital platforms as sites of interaction in the museum and can be viewed as part of an evolving discourse about the meaning and value of interactivity in the museum environment. Academics are currently preoccupied with considerations of how these technological advances alter the shape and identity of ‘publics’ (Marres 2012). As this chapter has argued, tropes of interactivity have in fact shaped the origins of the V&A and must continue to do so if the museum is to serve its function as a public institution. Since the aim of the Design Culture Salons is to act as a forum for dialogue and discussion, it is also interesting to take note of the language that punctuates and animates the Salons. Much of this circulates around concepts of movement – particularly speed – and looks to the transformative as well as productive capacities of design. Perhaps, as this chapter has argued, the museum itself can become a site of transformation. Of course, the contours and edges of this language will blur and be redefined over time, so the museum has to be ready to find new ways to capture and frame conversations about design as they emerge. 165

Design Objects and the Museum

Notes 1. New design specialisms that have emerged in the past decade and that evidence this change include service design, strategic design, design thinking, design activism, social design, interaction design and critical design. 2. This chapter focuses on those relating to contemporary design in the museum. This includes the V&A Learning programme, V&A Friday Late programme and the wider strategy and activities of the V&A Contemporary Architecture, Design and Digital team. 3. This was directly acknowledged in Design Culture Salon 7, ‘Transparency in Design: What does it mean?’, V&A Museum. Available online: http://designculturesalon.org/2014/01/13/salon-7-reflections-on-transparent-design/ (Accessed 20 May 2014). 4. Founded in 2000, the Institute of Ideas (IoI) is a UK -based public debating forum that aims to confront complex social issues through a two-day festival, debating groups and publications. Available online: http://www. instituteofideas.com/ (Accessed 22 July 2014). 5. TED originated from a conference in San Francisco in 1984 and first sprung from the recognition of a closer convergence between ‘Technology, Entertainment and Design’. The first six TED Talks were posted online in June 2006. By 2009, the number of TED Talk views had grown to 100 million. 6. Sociologist Noortje Marres stated: ‘An actual public is something that happens and cannot be created on demand’. See ‘Design Culture Salon 5: How does design invent new publics’. Available online: http://designculturesalon.org/ 2013/04/ (Accessed 20 May 2014). 7. Catharine Rossi used the term ‘deliberate uncertainty’ in her introduction to Design Culture Salon 9. 8. For instance, gender presented itself as a recurrent theme in Salon Series One and was directly addressed in Series Two, Design Culture Salon 9. Immigration was a recurrent theme in Series Two and was directly addressed in Series Three. 9. Design Culture Salon 4: ‘How does design function in a recession?’ took place one week after the Budget Report (26 March 2013). Design Culture Salon 2 on ‘making’ partly responded to the rhetoric of the 2011 Budget Report by George Osborne in which he described ‘a Britain held aloft by the march of the Makers’.

References Andrew, D. T. (1994) ‘London Debating Societies, 1776–1799’, British History Online. Available online: http://www. british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=238 (Accessed 10 March 2014). Archer, B. (1995) ‘The Nature of Research’, Co-Design, Interdisciplinary Journal of Design, 2, 6–13. Bohman, J. (2004) ‘Expanding Dialogue, The Internet, The Public Sphere and Prospects for Transnational Democracy’. In Crossley, N. and Roberts, J. M. (eds), After Habermas, New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing (pp. 131–155). Bonython, E. and Burton, A. (2003) The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Bratton, B. (2013) ‘We Need to Talk About TED’, Guardian, 30 December 2013. Cameron, F. (2011) ‘From Mitigation to Creativity: The Agency of Museums and Science Centres and the Means to Govern Climate Change’, Museum and Society, 9(2), 90–106. Castells, M. (2009) The Rise of the Network Society. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Coleman, G. E. (2010) ‘Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 1–16. Frayling, C. (1993) ‘Research in Art and Design’, Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1(1), 1–5. Gluibizzi, A. (2008) ‘Tickling the Ivory Tower: Toward a Salon Culture in Libraries’, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 27(1), 24–27. Habermas, J. (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Heath, C. and vom Lehn, D. (2008) ‘Configuring Interactivity: Enhancing Engagement in Science Centres and Museums’, Social Studies of Science, 38, 63–91. Heidegger, M. (2009) The Heidegger Reader. Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2007) Museums and Education: Purpose, Pedagogy, Performance. London: Routledge. 166

Design Culture Salons at the V&A Museum, London Julier, G. (2013a) The Culture of Design. London: SAGE . Julier, G. (2013b) Available online: http://designculturesalon.org/2012/11/28/reflections-on-design-culture-salon-1what-can-museums-do-with-contemporary-design/ (Accessed 22 June 2015). Kale, S. D. (2002) ‘Women, the Public Sphere and the Persistence of Salons’, French Historical Studies, 25(11), 115–148. Lash, S. (2002) Critique of Information. London: SAGE . Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: SAGE . Lash, S. and Lury, C. (2007) Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press. Latour, B. (2004a) ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public’. Available online: http://www. bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/96-MTP-DING .pdf (Accessed 14 March 2014). Latour, B. (2004b) ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30, 225–248. Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LeMahieu, D. L. (1988) A Culture for Democracy, Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Long, K. (2013) ‘V&A Acquires Katy Perry False Eyelashes as Part of New Rapid Response Collecting Strategy’, Dezeen, 18 December 2013. Available online: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/18/rapid-response-collecting-victoria-andalbert-museum-kieran-long/ (Accessed 12 April, 2014). Long, K. et al. (2013) ‘95 Theses’, Dezeen, 12 September 2013. Available online: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/12/ opinion-kieran-long-on-contemporary-museum-curation/ (Accessed 2 April 2014). Marres, N. (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything Click Here. New York: PublicAffairs. Roth, M. (2014) ‘Cultural Diplomacy’, V&A Podcast Series 1, No.16. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/ articles/v/v-and-a-podcast-cultural-diplomacy/ (Accessed 14 April 2014). Saumarez Smith, C. (2010) ‘The Institutionalisation of Art in Early Victorian England’, The Colin Matthew Memorial Lecture, Transaction of the Royal Historical Society, 20: 113–125. Smuts, A. (2009) ‘What is Interactivity?’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43(4), 53–73. Van de Weijer, M., Van Cleempoel, K. and Heynen, H. (2014) ‘Positioning Research and Design in Academia and Practice’, Design Issues, 30(2), 17–29. Woodham, J. M. (1996) ‘Managing Design Reform I, Fresh Perspectives on the Early Years of the Council of Industrial Design’, Journal of Design History, 9(1), 55–65.

Reports V&A Annual Report and Accounts 2012–2013. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0006/234789/annual_report_and_accounts_2012-2013.pdf (Accessed 23 July 2014). V&A Board of Trade Minutes, 21 November 2013 (214th Meeting). Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0014/240125/BoT-Minutes-21.11.2013.pdf (Accessed 22 July 2014). V&A Strategic Plan, 2011–2015. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/240576/14-15Iteration-of-the-Strategic-Plan1.pdf (Accessed 12 April 2014).

Interviews Aline Rezende, Research Co-Ordinator, R&D, MoMA , New York, Interview with Leah Armstrong (29 April 2014). Sumitra Upham, Curator of Education, ICA , London, Interview with Leah Armstrong (1 April 2014).

Websites http://www.designculturesalon.org http://www.instituteofideas.com http://www.leedssalon.org.uk http://www.ted.com/talks http://www.theurbansalon.org 167

168

CHAPTER 17 MUSEUMS ONLINE AND DIGITAL: SOME INNOVATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Liz Farrelly

Try an experiment The commissioning editor of this book suggested including ‘up to three images’ in each chapter, but I decided against it. Instead, try this experiment. Using the ‘Image’ mode rather than ‘Web’, search Google for an exhibition or museum. In milliseconds your screen will fill with hundreds of images; ‘official’ images created and posted by museums and galleries, and ‘unofficial’ images generated by media coverage (traditional and online) and uploaded to the Web by visitors documenting their experiences. Together these constitute a form of digital archive that is fluid, updatable and beyond the control of any institution or curatorial team. Although diverse in quality and content, such a ‘result’ constitutes a more nuanced cultural response than any sanctioned version of events. When discussing computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web, just three images will not do. Peter Lunenfeld calls the computer, ‘the first media machine that serves as the mode of production, means of distribution, and site of reception . . . the twenty-first century’s culture machine’ (2011:xiv). So there is little point including – rendered in black and white, ink on paper – an image of a webpage, which by the time this book is published, a year after writing, may have been replaced with the dreaded Error Page ‘404 File Not Found’ (Aamoth 2014). Stemming from an interest in the role played by design museums in the formation of the discourse of design, which considers the museum website as both a product of the museum and a site for discourse formation, this chapter will examine examples of innovations around museum activity in the digital and online realm, and in the process consider implications for design objects within museums, not least because a museum website itself is a ‘design object’.

Museums create design objects Museums collect and display design objects but they also create them. For example, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) commissions spectacular installations from renowned artist-designers and exclusive ‘in partnership’ products for sale in the museum shop. It stages temporary exhibitions produced by multidisciplinary design teams; an exhibition is also a design object. And like many other museums, the V&A publishes books and catalogues to accompany exhibitions and showcase collections.1 Commissions, products, displays and publications; all of these design objects are means by which the museum communicates. The museum website is another location, beyond the physical museum building, where all of these practices occur. Much has been written about how meaning is created by architecture and installations in museums (Duncan 1995; Storrie 2007), but museum websites present a particular set of problems when it comes to analysis. A museum website is a commissioned design object, albeit one that is sprawling, mutable, accessible in a variety of formats (depending on device and browser), and updatable by a large cast of characters, from museum managers, administrators and marketing teams, to curators (posting articles and research) and the 169

Design Objects and the Museum

public (when invited). It performs multiple functions, as: a sales tool, promoting attractions and events, and marketing the museum to visitors; a shop, providing an online retail showcase; a social calendar, detailing talks and activities and building a community of users; and a scholarly depository, disseminating research and providing a portal to collections and archives. All of these functions facilitate access – to information, places and spaces, objects and personnel. Whether you describe the museum website using the terms of commerce – as a brand extension – or, in the jargon of the Web, as an interactive and virtual museum, the website functions on as many levels as the ‘real’ museum.

Reading a website When it comes to ‘reading’ a museum website, the sprawling mutability presents challenges for design history and material culture methodologies. The perception of a website as a ‘tool’, a product of technology rather than design, suggests it may better fit the domain of Science and Technology Studies (STS ).2 Frequent and rapid changes, with earlier versions accessible only to technicians (if they were archived at all), reduce the website to the status of ‘ephemera’ rather than the more stable ‘document’. But, none of these issues should set a website beyond the remit of design history; in fact these issues echo current debates, within the discipline of product design and the curatorial departments tasked with collecting design, about the dematerialization of design.3 As definitions of design change, the website finds a better fit within the discourse of design. In Visual Methodologies, the language Gillian Rose uses to explain discourse analysis as a method for reading objects and images is suggestive of the Web. She suggests ‘pay(ing) careful attention to images . . . and to the web of intertextuality in which any image is embedded . . . [and] the institutional apparatus and technologies which surround them’, so as to reveal ‘the practices of institutions and their exercise of power’ (2007:169, 193). For many visitors, a museum’s website will be the only museum publication they will ever read, and it has become the primary medium for delivering information and making meaning. But because a website is both mutable and ephemeral ‘reading’ it is less than straightforward, especially when change occurs on a regular basis. A website redesign may be requested by a new director or management team, or be part of a museum regeneration project. Along with ‘refreshing’ the ‘look and feel’ of a website, it is likely that ‘outdated’ mission statements and an accumulation of years of content may be stripped out and consigned to a non-place beyond retrieval, literally overnight. Thus, the ephemeral status of a museum website presents a fundamental barrier to researching the evolution of this pervasive but elusive medium.

Hypertextual communicativity In Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Andreas Huyssen began his thesis on memory, culture and identity by comparing the seismic shift of ideology and politics in 1989 (breaching the Berlin Wall and the end of European Communism) with the ‘major historical upheavals’ two centuries earlier (the American and French Revolutions) that produced the Enlightenment, ‘emphatic visions of the future’ (1995:2). Huyssen explores how ‘memory is culturally constructed in the present’, the effects of media and media technologies on modern culture and ‘the struggle against high tech amnesia’ (1995:3–4). That Huyssen highlighted the year 1989 resonates for a number of reasons.4 In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee published a paper presenting his vision of a World Wide Web, admitting it was prompted by how ‘maddeningly slow’ he found the process of publishing research ‘via paper journals’.5 Berners-Lee’s idea was to ‘combine a visual hypertextual system with the communication protocols of the Internet to link these documents together over 170

Museums Online and Digital

the network . . . he wanted hypertext to simulate the communicativity of networks, and he wanted networks to simulate the visualized linkages of hypertext’; two years later, he ‘uploaded the first page’ (Lunenfeld 2011:168). Berners-Lee’s terminology from the language of science – hypertextual and communicativity – might easily translate into the language of museums – multimedia/interactivity and engagement. Huyssen recognized that the designer decade was a crucial moment in the evolution of museums. He goes on to suggest that Baudrillard’s simulacrum grew from McLuhan’s work on technological determinism effective by television. Huyssen recognized that this connection between image and information, facilitated by technology, led to Baudrillard’s simulation: the theory of simulation, which has at its center what in France is called la télématique (neologism formed from télévision and informatique [data processing]), exerts an understandable fascination since it seems to account for certain very ‘real’ tendencies of contemporary culture, extrapolates them polemically, and grounds them in the recent evolution of telecommunications (Huyssen 1995:175–176). McLuhan’s technological determinism and Baudrillard’s ‘sign value’ prefigure the digital museum and the Web. Huyssen suggests that media and technology shape culture and in the process create a simulation of the ‘real thing’. Interestingly, Huyssen wrote about how cultural memory was being altered by media technology before most of us even had an email address.

Locating the Web in the museum Museum websites and the way museum professionals and visitors interact with them has been determined by the increasing capabilities of technology, which has enabled a range of digital and online activities within the museum. Digital technology is used to: contextualize exhibits using multimedia; enhance interpretation via interactivity; enable engagement via connectivity; distribute collections and archives beyond the physical location; and establish the ‘virtual’ museum. Underpinning all of these is an aim to increase choice and response, to enable visitors/viewers/users to not simply receive, but to choose what to engage with and to share their reactions to it (West and Smith 2005). We live in a world dominated by images, circulated by the Internet, the vastness of which is calculated on a weekly basis: 4.74 billion pages on 13 October 2014.6 Interestingly, that growth from two pages in 1990 to whatever the total is when you read this, is not simply an upward curve but spikes and troughs dramatically. Bringing the reactive speed and informality of the Web to the museum might seem a mismatch. But the museum is changing too: ‘The definition of a museum has evolved in line with developments in society’.7 And the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM ) definition continues to evolve: ‘The museum will be considered as a process, as a forum, and as a construct’.8 Describing the museum in such fluid terms suggests that it not only reflects change but can instigate it. An examination of some moments in the pairing of museums and ‘hypertextual connectivity’ reveals the digital online museum as a site for the production of meaning and points towards innovations that might push the ubiquitous website beyond the current paradigm. One factor that might dispel the notion that the digital museum is a commonplace beyond the scope of analysis is its relative newness; in Fiona McLean’s comprehensive Marketing the Museum (1997), product of the first-wave publishing boom that fed the expanding discipline of Museum Studies, digital technology appears in the museum only in the form of (now defunct) CD -ROMs and Video Discs running interactive displays and available as take-home ‘guides’; databases are for record keeping; and the Science Museum is 171

Design Objects and the Museum

lauded for launching its World Wide Web ‘page’ in 1995; London’s Design Museum launched its first website in 1999. McLean mentions no other examples of museum websites, nor does the Web (or emails) feature in her marketing toolkit. She does, however, recognize which way the wind is blowing: ‘No museum can afford to ignore computer technology. Our daily working lives and leisure time are increasingly revolving around the use of multimedia. Computer technology is here to stay’ (McLean 1997:73). McLean might have accepted that it was here to stay, but in 1997 it had barely unpacked. That the museum world was slow to adopt digital interactive and communications technologies, within and beyond the physical site of the museum, is demonstrated by a conference in 1991 when many of the digital processes and procedures we now take for granted were described, and the advantages and disadvantages of their adoption were discussed. Evidenced by McLean’s book, it would take until the turn of the millennium for even some of these innovations to begin to appear in museums. Organized by Archives and Museum Informatics, the title of the conference, ‘Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums’, echoes Berners-Lee’s founding principles for the World Wide Web. The conference brought together museum professionals and ‘interactive media developers interested in serving museum requirements’ to show and tell their digital innovations with an eye on future connective technologies. ‘Museum interactive projects should enhance the public experience of the museum collection . . . The ultimate challenge is to transport the interactive multimedia museum not just outside its walls, but where there are no walls’, suggested David Bearman, editor of the Archives and Museum Informatics Technical Report, which published the conference proceedings (1991:2–3). Over forty papers (delivered by speakers from Europe, the US and Japan) focused on visitors, collections and publishing, and discussed: shared/searchable databases; re-using research and data; visualizing geographical and architectural contexts for museum objects; enhancing learning environments by adding multimedia capabilities; creating immersive galleries and virtual tours; and solving usability issues through interface design. Sounding so familiar now, these innovations were presented in the pre-Internet era when computers, outside the office, were a luxury item and the idea of interactivity via a ‘Graphic User Interface ’ was still nascent.9

Modes of interactivity within and beyond the museum walls The idea of interactivity in galleries, however, was not new. The Science Museum’s Children’s Gallery (a mass of pulleys and levers used to demonstrate basic scientific principles) was popular pre- and post-war.10 Recognized as a template for the science centres that proliferated during the 1970s and 1980s, which were often accused of being ‘expensive playgrounds’, the line between education and entertainment was blurred (Barry 1998:105). However, by the early 1990s when museums were identified as ‘part of the leisure and tourist industries’, coupled with a ‘decline of state funding’, interactivity was considered a boon, and the key to ‘greatly increase the attractiveness of museums to sponsors’ (Nash 1992:184 quoted in Barry 1998:101). A definition of interactivity in this era suggests that, in the context of the gallery, it would ‘enable visitors to make choices and to experience a gallery in their own way’. And, in the form of a museum display, interactivity constituted ‘techniques which encourage greater dialogue with the visitor’ (Macdonald and Silverstone 1990:184 quoted in Barry 1998:98).11 This aim of facilitating personal ‘selection’ resonates with the concept of the hyperlink, but is also present in other communication technologies and feedback methods, from postcards, pamphlets and catalogues by ‘art publishers’ (Nyburg 2014), to reviews in magazines and newspapers. Turning museum objects into distributable images (putting aside the mediation of a selector or editor for now) enables visitors to choose their experience of the museum. Bearman referred to the museum ‘where there are no walls’ (1991:2), and 172

Museums Online and Digital

le muse imaginaire, translated as ‘museum without walls’, has become a leifmotiv for accessibility via the photographic image as originally advocated by André Malraux, the French Minister for Cultural Affairs, 1959– 1969 (Barker 1999). Writing about her Virtual Feminist Museum, Griselda Pollock described Malraux’s innovation: ‘as the result of photographic reproduction which removed works of art from their original contexts and enabled them to be assembled in orders and relations defined by superimposed art historical logics of style, iconography, artist and nation’ (2007:10). Separating images from the weight of history and connoisseurship, which the museum’s intimidating spaces and places might be seen to impose (Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper 1969; Bennett 1995; Burton 1999) could allow viewers a more personal response to the artwork. But, on the other hand, it could also obliterate the intangible ‘aura’ of the unique object, which Walter Benjamin identified as being under threat from just this sort of ‘technical reproduction’ (Benjamin 1973:222).12 Pollock applied a feminist critique to Malraux’s notion: What makes critical feminist studies in the visual arts different starts with the various possibilities we claim for tracking relations among artworks outside of the museal categories of nation, style, period, movement, master, oeuvre, so that artworks can speak of something more than either the abstract principles of form and style or the individualism of the creative author’ (2007:10). Pollock recognized that, contrary to Malraux’s aim of creating free-floating images, these images of artworks remained heavily invested with museal categories, which when used to reorganize the images, again and again, drained them of meaning. That disconnection, from the solid context of the artwork and its history both with and beyond the museum, could only stifle meaningful analysis. Interestingly, Pollock makes it clear that she is not interested in any technological definition of ‘virtual’: ‘This is not a cybernetic museum on the internet . . .Virtual is used here first as an ironic term’ (2007:9). But Pollock was interested in ‘networks’, ‘encounters’, ‘transformative interactions’, and is intent on ‘questioning . . . memory, time, space and the archive . . . with works arranged according to a scheme that is not identical to their making’. Railing against the ‘canon’, she offers a ‘series of situated readings’ and ‘an open laboratory rather than a story’ (2007:11). But Pollock’s aim of ‘tracking relations’ and creating new narratives is mirrored in the functionality of the digital hyperlink, which used consciously could make Pollock’s ‘Virtual Feminist Museum’ more ‘real’.

Increasing engagement At the 1991 conference, while digital and communication activity was being sketched out, Bearman presented a shopping list of ‘issues’ (1991:4–5), which are now familiar problems associated with Internet usage: the circulation of de-contextualized images; the lack of industry standards; poor image quality, technical barriers, defunct technologies; the infringement of copyright; and, of course, cost. Bearman called for museums to collaborate with media professions in order to make their own content, and to be wary of giving away information and scholarship for free. Plus, he suggested that design was a crucial part of the mix: ‘Interactive and hypermedia hold tremendous promise for museums if good design and evaluation can be tied to visionary objectives and well conceived applications’ (1991:5). The next step was for museums to facilitate the production of digital content, and that included content created by visitors too.13 At this point Web 2.0 was still a long way off, but one paper from the conference demonstrated that just such an initiative was being trialled at the ‘nonprofit private research museum’, NeoMuseum, a Japanese initiative for interactive learning.14 The authors described a space where mentors and visitors co-create. ‘The real-time annotation, extension, and construction 173

Design Objects and the Museum

of documents . . . the design and development of simple tools for children to author and edit multimedia documents’ used the ‘most playful and interesting aspects of hypertext as originally envisioned by Engelbart and Bush’ (Ueda and Gross 1991:174).15 The key here is ‘annotation, extension, and construction of documents’; by inputting (using Engelbart’s mouse) and linking (via Bush’s hypertext), these young museum visitors were able to produce and share new content. Speculating on the reasons for the slow uptake of such initiatives is another story, but the cost of new technologies, a reticence to adopt one platform over another, and funding pressures all appear in recollections of early adopters.16 An impetus to grow museum websites (in the UK ) came with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.17 Required to upgrade transparency from mandarin to accountable, publicly funded museums were inundated with information requests, directed at already busy Public Relations departments. Museum websites became the conduit for delivering ‘behind the scenes’ documentation, such as Annual Reports, policy documents, mission statements and press releases. Transparency may have been the aim, but, even today mining the sprawling websites of major museums such as the V&A and MoMA takes time and patience. Confusingly there are often multiple routes to subject areas, which are similarly labelled. As with a ‘paper’ archive, perseverance is required, but a lack of industry standards means that navigating every museum website is an adventure.

Design museums and the digital That museums are engaging with digital and communications technologies in multiple guises is evidenced (within the context of Museum Studies) by the appearance of such an all-encompassing publication as Ross Parry’s edited volume, Museums in a Digital Age (2010). And, museum curators tasked with collecting and displaying design deal with the digital turn on a daily basis. Louise Shannon, the V&A’s Curator of Digital has written about organizing the exhibition Decode and the difficulties of collecting, preserving and displaying digital art and design (2014). Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Design and Director of Research and Development at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ), has been tasked with providing ‘the Museum with information and critical tools to evaluate new initiatives and identify new directions and unexplored opportunities, particularly in the digital realm’.18 In an interview Antonelli confirmed that this new role grew out of her subject knowledge of digital design innovation. Antonelli aims to share knowledge with curatorial colleagues across the museum, to incorporate digital innovation within other departments (Antonelli 2013) becoming, in effect, an advocate for the digital museum (Lohr 2014). Antonelli put her digital knowhow to a very public test by curating an exhibition ‘online’; examining that project brings issues relating to digital communication and the museum into sharper focus. Talk to Me Researching an exhibition that has been and gone means relying on extant traces, be they printed and published (catalogues, pamphlets, press releases and media coverage), or curatorial and administrative documents generated and archived by the institution. For Talk to Me there exists a printed catalogue (Antonelli and Hall 2011) and the exhibition files stored within the department, and these documents will eventually pass to MoMA’s archive. But Talk to Me also has an amount of museum-generated, online material documenting: the exhibits (design objects in various material and dimensional states, analogue, digital, mass-produced, one-off and speculative); the featured designers, manufacturers and selectors; and the selection process. 174

Museums Online and Digital

Talk to Me is described as ‘an exhibition about communication between people and objects’. Although it inhabited the Museum’s design gallery for little more than three months, it can be suggested that the show is still current, as it ‘exists’ in a virtual, online version. You can ‘visit’, by accessing the images and posts on the dedicated microsite and blog, reading the catalogue essay (for free) and peruse the downloaded exhibition checklist; all are available online. Talk To Me is not simply archived online, it was curated online by a team of independent experts who along with the museum curators nominated and reviewed projects and objects before voting exhibits onto the checklist. The exhibition’s microsite and WordPress blog19 exist as an online collection and a document of the curation process. As with a paper archive the information is tightly packed, and navigation is not made any easier via an interface that (perhaps knowingly and for the sake of nostalgia) quotes the pixelated aesthetic of earlier (1990s) websites. So, shall we try that Google image search experiment on Talk to Me?20 Now, alongside the official, permanent and site-specific material mentioned above (e.g. catalogue, paper documentation kept at the museum, dedicated pages on the museum’s website and a hyperlinked microsite), the ‘search’ presents a further layer of official but ephemeral material generated by the museum (e.g. installation images and exhibit photographs for marketing and press campaigns). But mixing in is more material, of less legitimate status, a mass of unofficial images, created and uploaded by visitors, media ‘amateurs’ and professional journalists and, this unofficial material will be different each time the search is performed. This proliferation of unofficial ephemeral is enabled by the same technology defined by Berners-Lee back in 1989, and later relabelled ‘Web2.0’. This ‘new version’ of the World Wide Web represents a change of behaviour, an evolution from downloading to uploading made possible by faster broadband connections and new image-making/communications gadgets, e.g. the smartphone. Apple’s iPhone was launched in 2008, making the Web mobile. This making and sharing of material via the Web provides another means of interacting with the museum: the photos, videos, reviews, comments, chats, blog and vlogs, turned up by a Google web/image search all become part of the ‘show’.

Permanent or ephemeral? Such a fluid density of material presents pros and cons for the researcher, not least because of the complexity of assessing vast amounts of ‘stuff ’ be it official, unofficial, permanent or ephemeral. If an exhibition is of a certain vintage you will find logged and tagged and safely (acid-free) boxed documentation available to view in a museum archive reading room, by appointment. The same care is not, as yet, extended to digital traces. If an exhibition has an official online element it may remain available but not necessarily permanent. A museum’s Communications Department, which generally controls the digital on-line presence, might decide that a microsite or exhibition webpage can no longer be ‘supported’ on its server.21 As for the unofficial material, generated by visitors, Internet search engines and Apple’s bespoke ‘icloud’22 storage system may be perceived as omnipresent, and limitless (for a fee), but neither can guarantee the extended protection or availability of any content. And, off-line digital storage is no more secure, evidence the incompatibility of new and old technologies (floppy disc anyone?). Ultimately the question is: How might a museum website be archived? Without access to ‘before and after’ versions, the evidence of how a museum continues to re-define itself is lost. The Web went from zero to ubiquitous within two decades, and even though museums got a slow start in regards to setting up websites, they were well placed, due to a familiarity with interactivity and the publication of information and ephemera, to embrace the challenge. Since Talk to Me in 2011, the digital museum arena continues to innovative new definitions of interactivity and engagement.23 Meanwhile, design objects remain central to the museum experience, and it is gratifying to see Berners-Lee’s computer displayed in the new Information Age gallery at London’s Science Museum, complete with a sticker asking that it not be turned off. 175

Design Objects and the Museum

This distinctive, black NeXT Inc. computer, designed by Frogdesign, was the very first Web server, and is now in a museum for all to see.24

Acknowledgements Thanks to: the AHRC ; my supervisors, Jonathan Woodham, Deyan Sudjic and Guy Julier; Paola Antonelli, Helen Charman, Donna Loveday and John Stones.

Notes 1. Forever installation by Universal Everything, 21 November 2008 to 1 February 2009, V&A. Available online: http:// www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/f/garden-installation-forever; Gloverall x V&A Slim Line Cut Duffle Coat, using Doris Gregg fabric design, ‘Welwyn Garden City’ for Footprints, 1926. Available online: http://www.vandashop.com /Gloverall-Slim-Duffle-Unisex-EVAEX /dp/B00NXV 5SQY; Memory Palace, 18 June to 20 October 2013, V&A. Available online: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-sky-arts-ignition-memory-palace/makingmemory-palace/ V&A Publishing; http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/v-and-a-publishing (Accessed 21 October 2014). 2. Kjetil Fallan offers a historiography of the discipline in Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (2010) and speculates on the cause and effect of the separation of the history of science and technology from the parallel development of design history/studies/culture (2010:56–65). 3. The dematerialization and re-definition of design is discussed by Jana Scholze in Chapter 6, and Gillian Russell in Chapter 11. 4. The Design Museum opened in July 1989. In the same year a number of other museums opened (or re-opened after major reinventions), including the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhine, Germany, at the tail end of the 1980s ‘museum boom’ (Huyssen 1995:17). 5. Tim Berners-Lee’s paper, ‘Information Management: A Proposal’ delivered at CERN in March 1989 and updated in May 1990, is available here: http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal (Accessed 22 June 2015). 6. See the size of the Web here: http://worldwidewebsize.com (Accessed 2 October 2014). 7. See ICOM’s definition of the museum here: http://icom.museum/the-vision/museum-definition (Accessed 2 October 2014). 8. From the Theme Statement at ‘Museums for Social Harmony’, ICOM ’s 22nd General Conference, Shanghai, China, 7 to 12 November 2010. Available online: http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/imd/2010/ICOM 2010_ Final_ThemeStatement.pdf (Accessed 2 October 2014). 9. Bill Moggridge: ‘I gave my first conference presentation on the subject in 1984, and at that time I described it as “Soft-face,” . . . I felt there was an opportunity to create a new design discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive solutions in a virtual world, where one could design behaviors, animations, and sounds as well as shapes. This would be the equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-dimensional objects’ (2007:14). Moggridge was co-founder of IDEO and Director of Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum from 2010 until his untimely death in 2012. 10. ‘Colonel Sir Henry Lyons, Director since 1920, argued in 1922 that in a technical museum the needs of “the ordinary visitor” should be placed ahead of those of specialists. One of his innovations was a “Children’s Gallery” which opened in December 1931. The aim was to stimulate the interest and curiosity of children in science and technology using simple and attractive displays and a large number of working models. Scientific principles were put over using what we now know as “interactives”, for example in the design of pulley blocks or the inertia of different materials.’ From the Science Museum’s website http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/history.aspx?page=3 (Accessed 29 July 2014).

176

Museums Online and Digital 11. Early examples of digital interactivity within museum galleries include the Study Collection hypercard index at Design Museum, London (Baker 1993:53), and the National Gallery’s MicroGallery, 1991 (Howell 2009:144–145). Both are mentioned in Rory Matthews’ (1999) paper that traces the evolution of multimedia products in museums through the 1990s. In Chapter 15 of this book, Jason Cleverly defines modes of interactivity, created by artists, curators, visitors and exhibits, within the gallery environment. 12. Gareth Williams mentions Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’ in Chapter 10 of this book, while Helen Charman cites Benjamin’s ‘aura’ in Chapter 14. These ideas are influential within art history but also resonate with design objects (in and beyond the museum). There are caveats, though, because of the ‘mass’ status of some design objects, and the likelihood they already exist beyond the walls of the museum. This being the case, design objects might challenge these familiar concepts. 13. George F. MacDonald, Director of what was then the Canadian Museum of Civilisation (reopened in 1989), commented on how plans for the new building had been fundamentally altered because, ‘we were unprepared for the developments of the 1980s’. Revised plans included state of the art fibre-optics and a television production studio: ‘Without these facilities we could not expect to achieve our vision of being an interactive museum that could serve both on-site visitors and electronic users at a distance’ (MacDonald 1992:163). 14. In the early 1990s, discussions about the potential of multimedia technologies and digital communication for educational purposes within the academic and the museum (for teaching design and design history), and for curating the virtual museum, produced a literature that was as visionary for being cross-disciplinary as it was for embracing technology within the humanities. See Barrett 1992; Hoptman 1992; Beardon and Worden [1993]1995; Benton 1996. 15. At the end of the Second World War, Vannevar Bush imagined a machine he called Mexem, an analogue ‘memory extender’ that would use chemical photographic techniques ‘to record and synchronize research findings and observations’. This curatorial mode would in turn ‘stimulate the human brain’s capacities for associative thinking’ and is credited with sparking the hypertext innovation (Lunenfeld 2011:149–150). Though far removed from Paris’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, there are shades of Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’. Douglas Engelbart created the input device that came to be known as the ‘mouse’, presenting it at ‘the mother of all demos’, 9 December 1968. ‘In 20 or 30 years, you’ll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world’ (Engelbart quoted in Lunenfeld 2011:157–159). See the demo here: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yJD v-zdhzMY (Accessed 2 October 2014). 16. Jim Hoekema recalled his role within the team of 100-plus museum personnel and media, design and technology consultants that produced Treasures of the Smithsonian, the museum world’s first CD -I (digital, interactive) ‘take home’. The project began in 1987 and launched in 1991. Actual costs were not disclosed, but the ‘highest production values’ were the goal (Hoekema 1991:128). 17. Freedom of Information Act 2000. Available online: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/contents (Accessed 22 June 2015). ‘Organisations you can ask for information’ • publicly funded museums https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/organisations-you-can-ask-for-information (Accessed 2 June 2014). 18. ‘Paola Antonelli Appointed Director of Research and Development at MoMA in Newly Created Role’; announced online by MoMA Press Office, 4 October 2012. Available online: http://press.moma.org/2012/10/paola-antonelliappointed-director-of-research-and-development-at-moma-in-newly-created-role (Accessed 7 May 2013). 19. See Talk to Me microsite here: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/talktome; The WordPress blog includes this descriptor: ‘This online journal has documented the process and progress of Talk to Me, and lives on to prolong the delight and continue the conversation . . . By allowing you behind the scenes of Talk to Me, we hope to shed some light on the curatorial process. — the TTM curatorial team’. http://www.moma.org/wp/talk_to_me (Accessed 7 May 2013). 20. Google image search for Talk to Me here: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=talk+toeoma+exhibition&client=firef ox-a&hs=sui&rls=org.mozilla:en-US :official&channel=sb&biw=1280&bih=672&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei =9ns5VNXuCNKM 7AbjqYC 4BA &ved=0CAYQ _AUoAQ (Accessed 9 June 2014 and 8 October 2014).

177

Design Objects and the Museum 21. ‘Oof ’; some of the museum’s web pages relating to Talk to Me have been removed. http://www.moma.org/wp/ talk_to_me/whos-talking (Accessed 9 June 2014 and 8 October 2014). 22. https://www.icloud.com (Accessed 8 October 2014). 23. Space does not permit investigation here, but Tate Encounters (and the subsequent publication assessing the project, Post-critical Museology (Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh 2013)) and The New Cooper Hewitt Experience both point to possible futures, be they education and community-based or offering visitors proprietary hand-held devices to interact with exhibits and become designers for the day. Available online: http://www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/ tate-encounters and http://www.cooperhewitt.org/new-experience/?utm_source=Cooper+Hewitt&utm_ campaign=d530cd26f4-July_2014_Design_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_461c6416c0-d530cd26f4299477673&mc_cid=d530cd26f4&mc_eid=5332b1e5e9 (Accessed 5 July 2014). 24. See the opening of the Information Age gallery here: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_ your_visit/exhibitions/information_age.aspx; and Berners-Lee on the next step of the World Wide Web here: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/Plan_your_visit/exhibitions/information_age.aspx (Accessed 22 June 2015).

References Aamoth, D. (2014) ‘404 Forever: 10 of the Web’s Best Error Pages’, Time, 7 October 2014. Available online: http://time. com/3478874/best-404-error-pages (Accessed 8 October 2014). Antonelli, P. (2013). Interviewed by the author, 8 May 2013. Antonelli, P. and Hall, E. (eds) (2011) Talk to Me: Design and Communication between People and Objects. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Baker, R. (1993) Designing the Future: The Computer Transformation of Reality. London: Thames and Hudson. Barker, E. (ed.) (1999) Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press and The Open University. Barrett, E. (1992) ‘Sociomedia: An Introduction’. In Barrett, E. (ed.), Sociomedia: Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press (pp. 1–10). Barry, A. (1998) ‘On Interactivity: Consumers, Citizens and Culture’. In Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London: Routledge (pp. 98–117). Beardon, C. and Worden, S. ([1993]1995) ‘The Virtual Curator: Multimedia Technologies and the Roles of Museums’ conference paper 1993’. In Barrett, E. and Redmond, M. (eds), Culture, Technology, Interpretation: The Challenge of Multimedia. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press (pp. 63–86). Available online: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/oldcontent/ cbeardon/papers/9506.html (Accessed 23 June 2015). Bearman, D. (ed.) (1991) Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums: Proceedings of an International Conference. Technical Report, No. 14, Fall 1991. Pittsburgh, PA : Archives and Museum Informatics. Benjamin, W. (1973) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Illuminations. Trans by H. Zohn. London: Fontana/Collins (pp. 219–253). Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Benton, T. (1996) ‘Multiple Media and Multimedia: Some Possible Options for the History of Art and Design’, Journal of Design History, 9(3), 203–214. Bourdieu, P., Darbel, A. and Schnapper, D. ([1969]1991) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Translated by C. Beattie and N. Merriman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burton, A. (1999) Vision and Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum. London: V&A Publications. Dewdney, A., Dibosa, D. and Walsh, V. (2013) Post-critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. Abingdon: Routledge. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge. Fallan, K. (2010) Design History: Understanding Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hoekema, J. (1991) ‘Treasures of the Smithsonian: A Museum Orientation You Can Take Home’. In Bearman, D. (ed.), Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums: Proceedings of an International Conference. Technical Report, No. 14, Fall 1991. Pittsburgh, PA : Archives and Museum Informatics (pp. 126–131).

178

Museums Online and Digital Hoptman, G. (1992) ‘The Virtual Museum and Related Epistemological Concerns’. In Barrett, E. (ed.), Sociomedia: Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press (pp. 141–159). Howell, C. (2009) ‘Space: The Final Frontier’. In Sharmacharja, S. (ed.), A Manual for the 21st Century Art Institution. London: Koenig Books and Whitechapel Gallery (pp. 142–155). Huyssen, A. (1995) Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge. Lohr, S. (2014) ‘Museums Morph Digitally: The Met and Other Museums Adapt to the Digital Age’. New York Times, 23 October 2014. Available online: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/arts/artsspecial/the-met-and-othermuseums-adapt-to-the-digital-age.html?_r=2&referrer (Accessed 24 October 2014). Lunenfeld, P. (2011) The Secret War Between Downloading & Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. MacDonald, G. F. (1992) ‘Change and Challenge: Museums in the Information Society’. In Karp, I., Kreamer, C. M. and Lavine, S. D. (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution Press (pp. 158–181). Matthews, R. (1999) ‘The Evolution of a Family of Multimedia Products over a Decade: the “Micro Gallery” family tree, past, present and futures’. In Bearman, D. and Trant, J. (eds), Cultural Informatics: Selected Papers from ichim99. Pittsburgh, PA: Archives and Museums Informatics (pp. 61–68). McLean, F. (1997) Marketing the Museum. London: Routledge. Moggridge, B. (2007) Designing Interactions. Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press. Nyburg, A. (2014) Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain. London: Phaidon. Parry, R. (2010) Museums in a Digital Age. Abingdon: Routledge. Pollock, G. (2007) Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Abingdon: Routledge. Rose, G. (2007) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2nd edn). London: SAGE . Shannon, L. (2014) ‘Curating Emerging Art and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum’. In Graham, B. (ed.), New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing (pp. 171–182). Storrie, C. (2007) The Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas. London: I.B. Tauris. Ueda, N. and Gross, M. D. (1991) ‘A New Learning Environment: The NeoMuseum/Children’s Media Museum Prototype’. In Bearman, D. (ed.), Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums: Proceedings of an International Conference. Technical Report, No. 14, Fall 1991. Pittsburgh, PA : Archives and Museum Informatics (pp. 169–179). Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life, Summary of Responses (2005) London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Available online: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http:/www.culture.gov.uk/ images/publications/understanding_the_future_responses.pdf (Accessed 4 June 2014). West, C. and Smith, C. H. F. (2005) ‘ “We are not a government poodle”: Museums and social inclusion under New Labour’. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(3), 275–288.

179

180

CLOSING COMMENTS

In her opening remarks at the 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, curator Zoë Ryan declared, ‘there is nothing that #design won’t touch’ (the hashtag is included because the message came via Twitter, posted by Camron, the Biennial’s PR agency). Central to the event was a programme of discussions around evolving definitions of the future, in relation to, amongst other topics, exhibitions and ‘things’. The relentless emphasis on progress and innovation in the world of design and its ubiquitous presence in everyday life might seem out of step with the museum, trusted with the preservation of the past. But, just as design may be said to touch everything so does the museum, with its encyclopaedic aim to represent all human endeavour. The two are a natural fit but not an easy one. Aligning the contemporary (and at some point all designed objects were ‘contemporary’) with what has been deemed worthy of preserving necessitates an investigation of aims and definitions; of design, of museums, and of how we examine, research and assess design, past and present. We started this project by giving ourselves plenty of scope, calling for papers on the topic Design Objects and the Museum. Investigating an ‘intersection’ could be restrictive on both fronts but the chapters submitted and selected demonstrate that our contributors refuse to be hemmed in by definitions. Design as an industry and practice is changing, as are design objects, museums, exhibitions and research. The work and ideas collected in this edited volume demonstrate such change with a diversity of subject and approach that mirrors the everything/everywhere ubiquity of design. The scope of the discourse produced by design history and design practice in relation to how design is collected, curated and displayed within and beyond the museum presents myriad opportunities for research, analysis and discussion. We hope this volume demonstrates this variety, from post-Second World War design promotion, born out of social equality, to the soft diplomacy of New Labour’s new millennium; from a resilient roll call of Italian creativity, to a reframing of Indian design education; and from the mass appeal of consumerist aspiration to the most esoteric fantasies of design playing at art. And, the methodologies employed by our contributors further broaden the scope of this project. Enriched by encounters with objects and archives, curators and display; by the practice of designing, writing, curating and teaching; and by engaging with the culture, politics and pragmatics of institutions, public and private, commercial and educational – the school, the gallery, the museum – in these ways praxis feeds theory. That a conference for art historians provided an early platform for us is testimony to the cross-disciplinary, boundary-blurring confidence of academic practice. That Bloomsbury Academic recognized the value of introducing our investigation to a wider audience will prompt the dialogue to continue beyond this initiative. That the Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Brighton, Victoria and Albert Museum and Design Museum, London supported our research and provided us with the opportunity to undertake this project, is re-validated here. We hope you enjoy and learn from this project as much as we have. Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell

181

182

INDEX

‘n’ denotes end-of-chapter notes 75 Watt exhibition 67 acquisition, defining objects for 65–6 ‘activism’ 62, 69n Adorno, Theodore 93 Affonso, Mauricio 102–3 Africa see West Africa Ahmedabad, India, NID 127–35 Alessi, Alberto 87 AngloMania exhibition 98, 103 Antonelli, Paola 174 Arad, Ron 69n archiving 63, 68, 175 art: autonomous artworks 92–5 design and 138–41 ‘Design Art’ 91 Interpretive Artistic approach 149–50 see also fine art art museums 61 artist-directed interpretive situational 151 artistic autonomy see autonomous artworks artistic patronage, industry 4 Arts and Crafts doctrine 20 see also Morris, William The Arts of Reform and Persuasion exhibition 116–20 see also The Wolfsonian Ashton, Leigh 10–11 Atlee government 16 audience: embodied criticality 107, 109–10 interpretation 124 see also visitors authenticity 77 autonomous artworks 92–5 autonomous design 92 awards process, Designs of the Year 34–5 ‘bad taste’ 53 Bandung Conference 129 Bauhaus vision 137, 143–4, 146n Bearman, David 172–3 Bel Geddes, Norman 97–8 Bennett, Tony 22 Berners-Lee, Tim 170–1 Betjeman, John 20 BIAE see British Institute for Adult Education Black, Misha 6–7

Board of Trade 8 Bolton, Andrew 98 ‘both/and’ approach 139 Bourdieu, Pierre 94 Boyle, Danny 102 Brighton College of Art & Design xii Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Hindu deities 73–7, 79 Indian diaspora as ‘authenticator’ 77 Kelkar Museum and 78–9 Brighton Polytechnic xii BritainTM Renewing our Identity 98–9 British art and design education xii–xiii British Council 132 British Institute for Adult Education (BIAE ) 3–4, 6 British manufacture, Nigerian gele 41–50 British salon culture 161 British stereotypical images 46–7 Bush, Vannevar 177n15 Butler, Derek 43–5 Cambridge, University of xii the canon 1–69 CEMA’s wartime exhibitions 3–13 Design Centre 27–40 Design Museum, London 51–60 immaterials 61–9 Nigerian design 41–50 V&A Circulation Department 15–25 captions 31, 54 carnivalesque 54 CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) 3–13 Central School of Design 15 Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP ) 122 chronological approaches 88 Circulation Department, V&A Museum xiii, 10, 12n, 15–25, 45 Clark, Kenneth 3–13 CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques) 122 Cohen, Revital 67 CoID see Council of Industrial Design Coldstream Report xii Cold War 129 Cole, Henry 15, 20, 23, 161 collaboration, interactivity 153–4 collecting: forming a museum collection 44 immaterials and 68

183

Index Indian living cultures 73–81 V&A’s strategy 164–5 Wolfson 115 colonialism see post-colonial period commercial projects 11 see also industrial design communicativity, hypertextual 170–1 Communist Party of Great Britain 15, 16, 22 community engagement 73–7 computer images 169 conceptual design 66 Conran, Terence 57–8 Constable: The Great Landscapes exhibition 150 Constance Spry: A Millionaire for a Few Pence exhibition 51, 57–8 consultancy 131 consumption 52 contact history 75 contact relations 75 contemplation, utilitarian objects 93 contemporary design: Clark’s attitudes 6 CoID 37–9n Floud on 17–20, 23 interpretation 124, 149–58 re-framing the familiar 141 salon culture 163 status/function 11 technology and 159 contemporary designers’ diplomacy 97–104 content and environment 143–4 contextual approach 140 contingent autonomy 94–5 conversational approaches 159–60 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 78 corporate patronage 99 cosmopolitanism 49 Cotton Board 21 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA ) 3–13 Council of Industrial Design (CoID ) 4, 7–11, 27–40 see also Design Centre, Design Magazine craft, Floud on 20–2 Crane, Walter 29, 21 critical design 66–7, 105–12 criticality, embodied 105–12 cultural diplomacy 97–104 cultural gravitas 141 cultural memory 171 culture, living cultures 73–81 curatorial practices 137–47 critical design 105–12 Design Museum 51–2 interpretation 124 Triennale Design Museum 83–90 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition see Ideal Home Exhibition

184

Dana, John Cotton 138 dance 67–8 Day, Lucienne 21 de Negri, Eve 41–2 decorative arts, V&A 18 deities see Hindu deities ‘deliberate uncertainty’ 163 dematerialization of design 170, 176n Derrida, Jacques 68 Describing Labor exhibition 122–4 Design: The Syndrome of Influence exhibition 88–9 design: is not art 138–41 meanings 83–4 design activism 62, 69n ‘Design Art’ 91–6 Design at Home exhibition 6–7, 9–11 Design Centre 27–40 Design Centre Award winners 23 Design Culture Salons, V&A 159–67 The Design Council see Council of Industrial Design (CoID ) Design High exhibition 91–3, 95–6 design history discipline 176n Design History Society conference 127–8 Design in the Home exhibition 5–6, 8 Design Index, 1951 37n Design Magazine xii, 18 Design Museum, London 51–60 curatorial practices 137–47 online 176–7n design museums: aims 83 digital technology 174–5 design objects, museums making 169–70 see also ‘object’ Design Research Unit (DRU ) 27 design specialisms, new types 166n1 Design Today in America and Europe exhibition 129–30, 132 Designers and Industries Association (DIA ) 27, 35n Designs of the Year exhibitions 27–40, 141–3 Deutsches Historiches Museum (DHM ) 121–2 DIA see Designers and Industries Association diasporas, India 73, 77 didactic interpretation 150–1 digital society 62 digital technology 155, 159–60, 162, 165, 169–79 Diploma in Art & Design, DipAD xii diplomacy, contemporary designers 97–104 displaying: immaterials and 68 interpretation and 120 documentation of immaterials 62–3, 68 Dream Factories: People, Ideas and Paradoxes of Italian Design exhibition 87 drones 63 DRU (Design Research Unit) 27

Index Duchamp, Marcel 96n Dunne, Anthony 66–7, 106–7 Dunne and Raby 66–7, 68, 106 Dutch Indonesia 116 Dyson, James 58 eagle images 118 Eames, Charles and Ray 129, 130, 133 economic aspects, manufacturing 87 economy of fear 110 education: CoID 34 museums and 161 NID 131 V&A Circulation Department 45 see also interpretation Edwardian design 19 egalitarian ethos, V&A 15 Eglin, Philip 149 Electronic Countermeasures exhibition 63 electronic environment, immaterials 62 embodied criticality 105–12 engagement: definitions 175 Designs of the Year exhibition 143 increasing 173–4 UK community engagement 73–7 English Chintz exhibitions 21 The Enlightened Eye exhibition 154–6 Enlightenment salon culture 161 environment, immersive 143–5 ephemeral nature, online museums 175–6 escritoire, interactive 152–4 the everyday: curatorial practices 138–9 Design Museum 58–9 Designs of the Year, 1957 27, 33 interpretation 120 wartime exhibitions 3–13 exhibition design: ‘Design Art’ 91–6 Design Centre 30–1 as embodied criticality 108–11 immersive environment 143–4 Indian living cultures 73–81 modern India 128–30 multifaceted nature of design 83–4 Fascist design 115 familiarity, re-framing 141–3 Familoni, Funke 42, 48 Farr, Michael xii, xiii fashion exhibitions 144 feminization 58 film 67 fine art 78–9 see also art Finnish design 116

Flamingo Textiles 44 Floud, Francis 23n Floud, Peter Castle 15, 16, 17–22 flower decorations 57 Forty, Adrian 139 Foucault, Michel 22 France: national identity 122 world’s fairs 97 Freedom of Information Act, 2000 174, 177n Friday Late programme, V&A 165 function of design 94 Futurama exhibit 97–8 ‘gallery envy’ 93–4 gele (headties) 41–50 gender 166n see also women Gere, Charlie 61 German Pavilion 120–1 globalization 128, 159 Glueck, Grace 115 ‘good design’ 27–8, 34, 36–7n ‘good taste’ 27 Google 169, 175 graphic design culture 87–8 Gray, Milner 8–9 Green, James Henry 76 Greenhalgh, Paul 97–8, 101 Grigson, John 20 guns 65–6 habitualization 138–9 Hamilton, Richard 137 Havell, E. B. 78 Hayes Textiles Limited 41–50 headties, Nigeria 41–50 Heal’s 21 Hindu deities 73–7, 78, 79 Hindu-ness 76–7 Hindutva term 76 History of design, discipline of xii Hitler youth figurines 118–19 Hogben, Carol xiii, 23 holistic approach 144 House of Words exhibition 152 Hungarian design 116 Huyssen, Andreas 170–1 ‘Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums’ conference 172 hypertextual communicativity 170–1 Ideal Home Exhibition 51–6 Ideal Homes, Design Museum, London 51–60 identity, critical design 106 images 169, 173 immaterials 61–9 immersive environment 143–5

185

Index immigration 166n In the Making exhibition 139–40 India: living cultures 73–81 modern exhibitions 128–30 NID exhibition 127–35 The India Report 130, 132–3 indigenization strategy, Nigeria 44 industrial design 4, 7–11, 18, 20, 21–3, 28 Industrial Officers (IO s), Design Centre 31 industrialization, India 131 interactivity 150–4 definitions 175 V&A Museum 159–67 websites 172 within/beyond museum walls 172–3 interdisciplinary approach 144 international trade 103 Internet 169, 170 see also online museums interpretation 113–81 contemporary characteristics 149–58 curatorial practices 137–47 innovations/implications 169–79 Italian design 86, 88 NID exhibition 127–35 politics and 115–26 practice 152–5 tropes 149–52 V&A Museum 159–67 Interpretive Artistic approach 149–50 Interpretive Didactive initiatives 150–1 Interpretive Situational approach 151–2 IO s see Industrial Officers Iota vessel 130 Isles of Wonder (Boyle) 102 Italian design 83–90 Italy: 1900–1945, see The Wolfsonian James Green Gallery of World Art 76 Johnson, Dr 152–3 Johnson, Philip 138 Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 115 judges panel, Designs of the Year 29, 33–4, 141 Julier, Guy 62, 159–60 Kelkar Museum 73, 77–9 Kiesler, Frederick 144 kinaesthetic learning 151 Kingston Polytechnic xii Kosuth, Joseph 124 Kular, Onkar 108–11 Kunst und Propaganda: Im Streit der Nationen exhibition 121 Leavis, FR xii labelling 78 labour-saving gadgets 54–5

186

language: Design Culture Salons 165 exhibition design 144 legacy, Triennale Design Museum 88 Leonard, Mark 98 Les Immatériaux exhibition 61 Liberty, Equality and Fraternity exhibition 122–4 limited edition designs 85 Liskeard and District Museum 154–5 logos, Nigerian gele 49 Lommée, Thomas 63–5 Lorimer, Anne 156 Louise Blouin Foundation 91–3, 95–6 Lyons, Henry 176–7n Lyotard, Jean-François 61 machine production 21 Malraux, Andre 97, 99, 173 see also museum without walls manufacturing: economic aspects 87 Ideal Home Exhibition 52 Nigerian gele 41–50 Margolin, Victor 118, 120 mass production: Triennale Design Museum 85 V&A Circulation Department 20, 21–2 material culture, digital technology 175 materialization 61 McLean, Fiona 171–2 memory 88, 170 men, Design Centre visits 28 Mendini, Alessandro 86–7 Mexem machine 177n Miami see The Wolfsonian Millennium Dome 98 modern cosmopolitanism, Nigeria 49 modernism: art/design history 51–2, 56 Clark’s attitudes to 6 modernity: Ideal Home Exhibition 53 India 128–30 politics and 116–18 Moggridge, Bill 176n MoMA see Museum of Modern Art moral implications, production types 18 Morris, Barbara 16 Morris, William 17–18, 20–1 multidisciplinary thinking 137 multifaceted nature of design 83–4 multimedia technologies 176n Muschamp, Herbert 118, 120 museum collection formation 44 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) 18, 129, 146n, 174 Museum Studies 160, 171

Index museum without walls 16, 97–104, 173, 176n museums, definitions 170 narrative of exhibitions 91 National Diploma in Design, NDD xii national exhibitions, France 97 National Gallery 8–9 national identity: Britain 98 France 122 politics and 116 national industry, Designs of the Year 28 National Institute of Design (NID ) 127–35 National Security Agency (NSA ) case 63 nationalism: cultural diplomacy 103 Hindu 77 Naylor, Gillian xii Nazi propaganda 115, 124 Nehru, Jawaharlal 128–9, 130 network systems 83 New Art History xii New Labour, UK 73, 98 New York Times 115 NID (National Institute of Design) 127–35 Nielsen, Ruth 45, 48–9 Nigerian design 41–50 NSA (National Security Agency) case 63 ‘object’: audience relationship 107 interpretation 120 see also design objects object-based approaches 159–60, 164 Olympics 101–3 ‘one-offs’ 85–6 online museums 169–79 open source designs 63–5 Oxford, University of xii, 16 Papanek, Victor J. 62 participatory performance 110 patronage 4, 12n, 99 pedagogy, NID 131 performance: filming 67 Indian living cultures 73–81 participatory 110 performative concept 108 permanent display Hindu deities 73 Wolfsonian, Florida 120–1 permanent exhibitions online 175–6 Perry, Grayson 149 Pevsner, Nikolaus 20, 35n photography 173 politics 115–26, 164 Pollock, Griselda 173

Polytechnics xii popular appeal, Ideal Home Exhibition 53 positioning design 71–112 embodied criticality 105–12 exhibiting ‘Design Art’ 91–6 Indian living cultures 73–81 museum without walls 97–104 post-colonial period 41–50, 128 post-war design 16, 23, 128 pottery 24n presentation, politics and 115–26 Pride cutlery 38n process-driven design 62, 139–40, 159 producing design objects 169 production types 18 ‘progress’ concept 97–9, 101 ‘progressive government’, V&A 16, 21 propaganda 11, 115, 124 ‘public’: Designs of the Year 27–8 terminology 161 public educator, CoID 34 public projects 101 public salons 161–2 public service, V&A 16 Pyrex objects 18 Raby, Fiona 66–7, 106 radio broadcasts 23n Rawsthorn, Alice 57–8 RDI s see Royal Designers for Industry re-framing the familiar 141–3 readymades 96n recessions 163, 166n regional exhibitions, V&A 16–17 research-oriented works 108–9 retailers, Ideal Home Exhibition 52 rhetoric 120 Rijksmuseum Schiphol 99–100 Risk Centre exhibition 105, 108–11 rituals, Hindu deities 76 Rogoff, Irit 105, 107, 111 Royal College of Art xii Royal Designers for Industry (RDI s) 31–2, 34, 37n Royal Niger Company 42 Rural Industries Bureau 21 Russell, Gordon 21 Saarinen, Eliel 116 salon culture 161–4 see also Design Culture Salons Sampe, Astrid 31–4, 38n Sarabhai, Gautam and Gira 131 Sarkar, Tanika 77 Scandinavian design 33–4, 38n scholarship 137, 150 Seed Cathedral exhibition 101 Series/One-offs, Triennale Design Museum 85–6

187

Index Shalev-Gerz, Esther 122–3 Shklovsky, Viktor 138–9 shopping guide, Design Centre 28–9 Sibson, Malcolm 43–5 sited interactive interpretive situational 152 situational interpretation 151–2 social history museums 52 social housing 54 social implications, production types 18 social media 162 social relations 56 society, critical design and 106–7 Somerville College xii South Kensington Museum 75 see also V&A source community 75 sponsorship 53 Spry, Constance 57–8 stereotypical images 46–7 storytelling 91, 95 Summerson Report xii The Studio 20 swastikas 120–1 Swedish design 33–4 see also Scandinavian design symbolism, Nigerian gele 48 Talk to Me exhibition 174–5, 177–8n ‘taste’: CEMA and 9 Clark on 8 Designs of the Year, 1957 27 Ideal Home Exhibition 53 re-framing the familiar 141 V&A Circulation Department 17 Tate Encounters 177n TDM5: Grafica Italiana exhibition 87–8 technology 49, 154–6, 159–60, 162, 165, 169–79 TED Talks 166n Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design exhibition 91–2, 94–6 temporal dimensions of design 163 temporary exhibitions 143–5, 175 textile manufacturers 43 Textile and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition 129 textile swatches, Nigerian gele 45 thematic clusters, Italian design 84 The Things We Are exhibition 86–7 Thwaites, Thomas 105–6 The Toaster Project 105–6 touring exhibitions 3, 6, 15–25 trade: Britain–Nigeria 42 international trade 103 trail-based exhibitions 133 travelling exhibitions see touring exhibitions Triennale Design Museum, Milan, Italy 83–90 Troika 99, 101

188

UAC (United Africa Company) 43 UK see United Kingdom United Africa Company (UAC ) 43 United Kingdom (UK ) community engagement 73–7 India and 132 values 101 United Micro Kingdoms exhibition 67 United States (US )–India relations 129 Useful Objects exhibitions 146n usefulness of design 94, 96 utilitarian objects 93 ‘Utility’ 56, 59n V&A Museum see Victoria and Albert Museum values, United Kingdom 101 van Balen, Tuur 67 Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum: Circulation Department 10, 12n, 15–25, 45 ‘Design Art’ 91–2, 94–6 Design in the Home exhibition 5–6, 8 English Chintz exhibitions 21 gele donation 41, 43, 44–5 interactions 159–67 open source designs 65 producing design objects 169 Victorian & Edwardian Decorative Arts exhibition, 17, 19, 20 Victoria, Queen 116–17 Victorian design 19 ‘virtual’ museums 173 visarjana ritual 76 visitor-led interpretation 143 visitor research 138 visitors, Design Centre 36n see also audience Wakefield, Hugh 23 wartime exhibitions 3–13 wartime ‘Utility’ 56, 59n Washington Post reviews 124 Weapons of Mass Dissemination exhibition 121 Wearden, Jennifer 44–5 websites 169–72 Wedgwood, Designs of the Year 33–4 Wedgwood Virtual Portrait Medallion 152 Weir Committee 4, 7 Weir Report 36n West Africa 43, 45 WI (Women’s Institutes) 55–6 Wilson, Cody 65–6 Wolfson, Mitchell Jr. 115–16 The Wolfsonian, Miami Beach, Florida 115–26 Arts of Reform and Persuasion 116 Italy: 1900–1945 115 Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 115 Style of Empire: Great Britain 1877–1947 115

Index women: Designs of the Year, 1957 31 Hindu nationalism 77 Ideal Home Exhibition 52, 54 see also gender Women’s Institutes (WI ) 55–6 workshop-based approaches 151

worktables, interactive 152–4 World Art, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery 78–9 world’s fairs 97, 103 Yoruban gele 41–2 You Are Here: NID Traces exhibition 127–35 Young, Liam 63

189

190

191

192

193

194