Disobedient Objects

Product Information

Testing an inflatable hammer made by Eclectic Electric Collective at the Berlin Mauer Park, 2010. Photo: Jakub Simcik Made by the Treatment Rooms Collective: Luke Allen, Gary Drostle, Mark Drostle, Eoghan Ebrill, Linda Griffiths, Gabrielle Harvey-Smith, Liam Heyhow, Peter Henham, Kevin O’Donohue, Carrie Reichardt, Thayen Rich, Sian Wonnish Smith, Cerdic Thomas, Liam Thomas, Karen Wydler, Mark Wydler

The 1989 Met. Museum poster has been periodically updated by the Guerrilla Girls. The subtitle for the 2012 reworking now reads: ‘Less that 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female’. The iconic Met. Museum poster is accompanied by correspondences and gorilla masks in the Disobedient Objects exhibition. The presence of their work is attracting the attention of a diverse audience. The costumed mannequins have proved to be a source of fascination for young girls in particular; the monumental forms are symbols of strength and ambition. The Guerrilla Girls have supported the exhibition with a late-night visit to the V&A. They retrospectively described the exhibition Disobedient Objects as ‘really outside the box’. They continue to wear the notorious gorilla masks as the ‘conscience of the art world’. Graffiti Writer” is a robot for writing street graffiti, designed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy, USA, 1998. (Photo courtesy Institute for Applied Autonomy) The raw anger, energy and wit of protest comes to genteel South Kensington. Alice Bell finds it most refreshingObjects and imagery will be displayed alongside a text from the curators as well as explanations from the activists about how they came up with the ideas and how they were used. Bone china with transfers printed in green, bearing the emblem of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Image courtesy of V&A Museum In the same section of the show we have “bloc books”, painted shields in the form of giant works of literature and philosophy made by students protesting at education cuts. When they demonstrated, the students were effectively being defended by culture, and by striking the shields, the police not only invoked the destruction of books but were also forced into a performance without realising it.

When students in London saw videos of this online, they produced their own book shields and this spread to the US and all over Europe. None of these groups every met, but they felt like they were communicating with each other.And that is what Disobedient Objects ultimately presents -- a sensitively and intriguingly crafted story of protest. The eclectic mosaic car might take centre stage and a giant inflatable silver cobblestone hangs from the ceiling, along with a small drone -- but these are interspersed with badges, placards and leaflets. That disparity tells the story of a protest history. The people behind the objects might not always have the ability to be as loud or brash as a mosaic car or silver balloon, but they will find a way to tell their story. And all 99 objects are proof of that. The phrase “go the extra mile” comes from a biblical example of civil resistance. During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus advises oppressed Jews that if a Roman “forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles”. While this lesson is widely taken as advocating the meek acceptance of authority figures, theologian Walter Wink advocates an alternative interpretation: in first-century Judaea, Romans were legally entitled to demand Jews carry items for up to one mile, but any further than this and the Roman could be prosecuted. A Jew going that extra mile committed no crime themself, but turned the tables of power on the Roman, who had to wriggle out of a potentially humiliating scenario. Jesus, therefore, is not talking of cowed subservience but of finding sophisticated legal loopholes to destabilise power dynamics between oppressors and oppressed. This theme of legal subversion underpins many objects on show.

Disobedient objects were not made with a museum in mind. Nor do they rely on the museum to legitimate them – but this does not mean that they have nothing to gain from appearing here. Before we located them, some of these objects were retired from the street to rest in private lofts or social centre basements. Now they find themselves returned to visible public history. For other objects, their struggles are unfinished, and when this exhibition closes they will return to take their place within them. Whatever our emotional reaction or identification with these unfinished objects, we mostly encounter them for only a brief moment. Perhaps inches from our bodies in a crowd; held by (or holding up) our friends; in news footage of people who could be us; in photographs of days growing distant; or suddenly reappearing in a courtroom. The exhibition of these objects is, in fact, one moment when you might actually spend time with them, right in front of you, able to slowly examine them beside each other. How might this moment of exhibition relate to these other moments, of use by activists, newspaper photographers and so on? News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Plus occasional updates. Dezeen Awards China All documentation remained digital and, once complete, was made available to all relevant staff. Condition reports were produced at object arrival and kept as image based as possible. Status, i.e. ‘object’, ‘prop’, ‘remake’ was made clear at the early stages of planning, ensuring the required level of information was gathered for each individual item. Installation notes were made during V&A installation and shared in the first tour venue. Along with advice from the Exhibitions Department, providing tour venues with this information in advance will give a clearer idea of the complexity of the install, highlight required resources and also provide greater clarity when discussing each object in general. Planning and sharing in this way will hopefully eliminate elements of surprise and keep reaction to a minimum. Images: Victoria and Albert Musem, London, Jonathan Slaff, Oriana Eliçabe/Enmedio.info, Immo Klink, Martin Melaugh, Ed Hall, Andy Dao and Ivan Cash, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Blanca Garcia, George LangeMy favourite exhibit is a tiny resistor from a Polish radio, turned into a Solidarnosc badge. A play on the word resistance, it’s also a nod to the radio they communicated with. As with several exhibits, I wondered if this resistor might be better presented in the Science Museum, or at least it would have been interesting to develop the ideas in contexts The show begins with a teacup emblazoned with the emblem of the Women's Social and Political Union, campaigners for universal suffrage in the 19th century. Besides luring conservative journalists who might otherwise have dodged an exhibition about protest, it makes the point that activism is neither new nor clear-cut. Many members of the Suffrage movement maintained links to the Nazi-sympathising British Union of Fascists, but for curators Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood, the show is not about taking sides. They reject the “rigid geometric scheme” of the modern Left/Right binary, recognising the story of political dissent is much older.

Disobedient objects have a history as long as social struggle itself. Ordinary people have always used them to exert counterpower, and object-making has long been a part of social movement cultures alongside music, performance and the visual arts. While these other mediums of protest have been explored before, this exhibition is the first to look broadly at material culture’s role in radical social change. It identifies these objects as part of a people’s history of art and design. The exhibition begins in the late 1970s, taking as its starting point the cycle of global social struggles beginning in that period which engaged with the emerging political terrain of neoliberalism and new technologies. Disobedient Objects goes beyond the political posters that usually represent social movement in museums, presenting high-tech objects such as drones for filming demonstrations as well as handcrafted items such as placards and textiles that reveal the stories behind protests. Icon spoke to the exhibition’s co-curator, Gavin Grindon. Other objects set to feature in the show include a shiny inflatable cobblestone thrown at police by Spanish protestors in 2012 as a harmless version of a weapon traditionally used by rioters. Coral Stoakes, I wish my boyfriend was as dirty as your policies. Image courtesy of the V&A Museum. Main image:Inflatable cobblestone, action of Eclectic Electric Collective during the General Strike in Barcelona. Image courtesy of Oriana Eliçabe/Enmedio.info The Eclectic Electric Collective made us a cobblestone for the exhibition. This is an issue with this material, because quite often it is destroyed in the process of protest.

A World to Win: Posters of Revolution and Protest

Museums often feel haunted because the objects they contain are relics, or what Elizabeth Wilson calls the ‘congealed memories’ of the people, now absent, that handled them. The V&A’s current exhibition Disobedient Objects invites us to think about this intimate relationship between things and the people who make and use them. It consists of 99 objects, made by people campaigning for social and political change, arranged according to different methods of protest. There is a focus on the ingenuity and craftsmanship in the design of the objects; even the exhibition space, designed by Jonathan Barnbrook, uses an aesthetic language of Do It Yourself manuals that emphasises the hand-made character of most of the objects.