Category Archives: Book

Tomorrow’s Designer; discussion at the Design Museum

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Screen Shot from the Design Museum’s website, detailing the evening’s event

Tomorrow’s Designer: What next for Designers in Residence?
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London SE1
23 March 2016

Chair: Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator, the Design Museum.
Speakers: Indy Johar Co-founder of Architecture00; Gem Barton Course Leader in Interior Architecture, University of Brighton; Ineke Hans of Studio|Ineke Hans; and Asif Khan founder of architecture studio Asif Khan Limited.

The opening of the new Design Museum, its latest incarnation, is getting closer, the stand-alone shop on High Street Kensington launched this week, and the main Museum building will be unveiled in late November. Right now, the Design Museum in Shad Thames is closed. So here’s a review of the last event I attended, back in March, which discussed the “designer of the future” with reference to the Museum’s Designers in Residence programme.
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From the Archive (and now); Destroy, punk and DIY

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So an email arrived inviting me to the launch of Punk.London at Oxford Street’s 100 Club, and I have to admit it didn’t totally intrigue me. Instead in gushed cloudy memories of a dark, sweaty cellar and an uncomfortable din, which I must have endured (it feels like) a hundred times over a couple of decades. But a closer look at the invite revealed this to be an occasion for nostalgia, a celebration of a 40-year anniversary marking London’s punk moment and the start of a movement, a subculture in fact, the long-tail of which has affected both attire and attitude.

Screen Shot from Punk.London website, designed by Brody Associates, inviting D-I-Y participation in a city-wide cultural event

Screen Shot from Punk.London website, designed by Brody Associates, inviting D-I-Y participation in a city-wide cultural event

“Subversive Culture” is the strapline (pardon the bondage-tinged pun), which it is claimed has fuelled creativity (now the Creative Industries) ever since. Over the coming year a host of venues will stage events big and small, backed by the Greater London Authority (GLA); shouting about London’s past punk credentials must have tourist-attracting potential. With an identity and online hub branded by Neville Brody (still demonstrating punk attitude by being “notoriously abrasive”, according to Digital Arts), for me the most innovative element is an prompt to organise your own event; tagged “D.I.Y.” the page offers links to branding and fundraising advice, via the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

Regardless of designated anniversaries punk is perennial, and it doesn’t need much of an excuse to hit the headlines. In 1998 I reviewed an exhibition, Destroy: Punk Graphic Design in Britain, and because it isn’t available on the magazine’s website I’m re-posting it, see below. Yes it was cheeky of me to declare punk to be the only “memorable cultural event in the 1970s”, but that’s a clue to my age. I may have been “witness” to the “heyday of punk” but only just; the article is unapologetically London-centric, too, hardly surprising as I was still at school and London was home. What isn’t mentioned is that I was a lender to the show too, having amassed a substantial collection of vinyl due to a fascination with indie record shops. I sold most of the best bits (the vultures were already circling at the Private View) as I became nomadic, leaving London in April 1998, and had neither the means (no turntable) nor inclination (changing musical tastes) to listen again.
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Design Objects and the Museum; the book

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Cover DOATM Bloomsbury

Design Objects and the Museum
Edited by Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell
Bloomsbury Academic, 2016

Contributors: Leah Armstrong, Nicola Ashmore, Sue Breakell, Helen Charman, Jason Cleverly, Liz Farrelly, Guy Julier, Marianne Lamonaca, Virginia Lucarelli, Magha Rajguru, Gillian Russell, Jana Scholze, Nicola Stylianou, Deborah Sugg Ryan, Damon Taylor, Joanna Weddell, Gareth Williams, Tom Wilson, Ness Wood, Jonathan Woodham

Having worked in publishing – commissioning, editing and writing – it was interesting to see how the process of co-editing a book of academic papers for a peer-reviewed press differs from creating visual books for mainstream publishers. Why? Because myself and a colleague, Joanna Weddell, a fellow AHRC CDA candidate at University of Brighton, have completed just such a “tome” for Bloomsbury Academic.
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Symposium; Hewison revisits heritage

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Old postcard found on Pinterest.

Old postcard found on Pinterest.

Heritage in the 21st Century
Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories Annual Symposium
University of Brighton
Grand Parade, Brighton
7 February 2015

The programme promised critical analysis of literary guide books, prime-time costume dramas, gourmet vegetables and redesigned bank notes, the cherry on top being a keynote lecture from Professor Robert Hewison (Lancaster University), an academic legend, living and breathing. Professor Graham Dawson (Director of CRMNH) introduced the day by highlighting some issues; heritage is cross disciplinary and “slippery” and has supplanted “culture” as the buzz word du jour, but that doesn’t make it easier to define as, since the 1980s, its meaning has shifted especially in an era of the New Right and consumer capitalism. Plus, “tensions” between practitioners and critics, especially in the museum world, make it more difficult to question orthodoxies; leaving us with a big question to ponder, “how might heritage function in the 21st-century, in an age of austerity and new technology?” Co-convener, Professor Deborah Philips was also looking for definitions; “how do you describe heritage”, and provided a clue from The Oxford English Dictionary, which lists the root of the word as “inherited from the French”. I like that it’s borrowed from the language that also gave us “bureaucracy”, and also that Deborah went to the dictionary. Updating that methodology, the pr-installed Dictionary program on my MacBook includes “property, inheritance, value and preservation” in its definition. Then Deborah complicated the issue by suggesting that heritage has “many competing” definitions, and brought in a Guardian travel supplement offering “culture and heritage tours” as evidence, setting the scene for Hewison’s end of the day lecture. A PDF of the full programme is here.
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From the Archive (& now); a moment of manga

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Manga is a popular choice for museum exhibitions and displays: with boundless variations in content and style, it’s accessible but (still) culturally exotic; it mixes scholarly research with contemporary collecting; and whether PG-rated or not, attracts a diverse audience of geeks and gawkers of all ages. Not for the first time, the British Museum gives over the high profile Room 3 (can’t miss it, first stop on the right) to a manga-moment with Manga now: three generations, which features new and specially commissioned work by Chiba Tetsuya, Hoshino Yukinobu and Nakamura Hikaru. I’ll pop in to inspect it next time I’m on the hallowed ground.

Manga now, three generations
The Asahi Shimbun Displays, Objects in Focus
British Museum
Great Russell Street, London WC1
www.britishmuseum.org
3 September to 15 November 2015

Screen Shot from the British Museum’s website; three manga artists

Screen Shot from the British Museum’s website; three manga artists

Previously the same gallery featured the stunning display, Manga, Professor Munakata’s British Museum adventure (5/11/09-3/1/10), by Hoshino Yukinobu. Jane Cheng reviewed that show on Eye, here: “The juxtaposition of hugely enlarged with minutely detailed asks visitors both to lean in closer and to step back”. Jane’s post features great images of the life-sized cut-outs in situ – like walking through a giant pop-up book — and she highlights the interactive nature of illustration exhibitions (something I recognised too at the V&A’s Memory Palace show, and featured in a conference paper, here). Loving a museum-based-mystery, especially one that showcases perfectly rendered images of museum objects (and hat’s off, what a tie-in, when’s the movie?), I ordered said graphic novel from the BM’s online shop having received a timely email reminding me of the publication on the same morning that the new show opened; now that’s what I call museum marketing. The online shop also tells customers, “Every purchase supports the Museum” (rather than Amazon).
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VitraHaus, displaying design for sale; implications for design museums

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VitraHaus
Vitra Campus
Ray-Eames-Str. 1, Weil Am Rhein, Germany
www.vitra.com
Visited, 16 to 18 October 2014

In relation to design objects and the museum, VitraHaus, the close neighbour of VDM, is worth pondering. Sited on the Vitra campus, it opened in 2010. As the flagship store for the Vitra Home Collection it showcases the furniture manufacturer’s domestic ranges (distinct from the contract products that are specified by architects for public and office spaces). On Vitra’s vast website, the page for VitraHaus invites us to “find inspiration for your home, explore your taste in design and try out, order and purchase furniture and design objects”.

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MUSCON at Vitra; and a summer of design exhibitions

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MUSCON 2014
European Museum Network Conference
Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Str. 2, Weil Am Rhein, Germany
www.design-museum.de
15 to 18 October 2014

Last year I was invited to attend a MUSCON conference hosted by the Vitra Design Museum, the institution that instigated the network back in 1996. I was present as an observer (along with fellow researchers Sabina Michaelis and Rosita Satell from the University of Southern Denmark) as the event is intended for staff from member institutions to pitch and negotiate the “buying and selling” of upcoming exhibitions as touring shows (here’s how VDM do it). Every year or so there are regional MUSCON conferences in Europe, the US and Asia. As a crash-course in museum programming and an introduction to a wide range of institutions (from Finland to Italy, Kilkenny to Ljubljana), the conference offered an opportunity to underpin my research with the kind of real-world issues facing museum staff…and put names to faces. Although not every MUSCON institution is a “design museum” they’re all keen to include design in their curatorial offer.
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Tracing the temporary; clues to past exhibitions

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I’m apologising upfront for ranging around a few ideas here. I wanted to avoid using footnotes but not lose any tangents either; after all this is a blog post which needs to be a little more condensed than my thesis (!) but at the same time it is discursive. This is a place for me to try out ideas.

While my PhD is not a history or geography of design museums a taxonomy is helpful in order to demarcate the field, the still novel “museum type” of “design museum”. The exhibition catalogue, Design Museums of the World: Invited by Die Neue Sammlung Munich (published by Birkhäuser in 2004) accompanied the show, Design Museums of the World, staged at Neues Museum Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nürnberg (17 September to 23 November 2003). A rich source of information and opinion, this surveys the field at the start of the 21st-century, and I investigate it at length in my literature review.

If I could travel the world visiting exhibitions I would, but as I don’t…I didn’t see the exhibition and I would guess that few of the MUSCON Europe delegates did either, as when a big box of the exhibition’s catalogues made an appearance at Vitra Design Museum (summer 2014), coinciding with Angelika Nollert’s keynote speech, it was eagerly consumed. Angelika had been Director at the Neues Museum Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nürnberg and is now Director at sister institution Die Neue Sammlung München; the collaboration between the institutions, which produced the exhibition and publication, is mirrored by Angelika’s career.

As I’m interested in how a temporary show lives on after its “time is up”, this catalogue proves a point – the usefulness of investing in print on paper. Originally produced for the debut exhibition at Nürnberg’s new art and design museum, the catalogue is a unique resource for comparing and contrasting a number of design museums, 29 in all, at a particular moment in history. Worldwide there are about twice that number now, and while many of the institutions listed in the catalogue evolved from museums of decorative arts, or were art museums that extended their remit, most of the newly opened institutions are “purely” design focused. Along with the newbies, some of the world’s most established museums of design are reinventing themselves; this is a time of flux.
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From the Archive; advice from Howard Tangye

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Thinking about fashion exhibitions, and the way that fashion designers and students use museums and galleries for inspiration, reminded me to re-post this account of a round-table discussion at London’s Design Museum about Fashion Illustration, as a discipline, practice and commodity. This event was very well attended and super informative, and part of the programme around the Drawing Fashion exhibition, which I reviewed on Eye Blog, here, and reposted on this blog too, here.

Drawing Fashion
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London SE1
3 November 2010 to 6 March 2011
Drawing Fashion debate
5 November 2010

Another reason for reposting this now, is because Howard Tangye had an exhibition this month at the Hus Gallery, “Casting the Line”; the catalogue may be downloaded, here. I became an instant fan of Howard’s work on hearing him talk at this debate, and when Stina Gromark and Louise Naunton Morgan of STSQ launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the design and publication of a monograph of Howard’s work, I was happy to contribute. The resulting book, Within — Howard Tangye is proof that Kickstarter is a very good thing!

Eye Blog Fashion Illustration Debate

Thursday 4:58pm, 18 November 2010
Design Debate”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally published on Eye Blog

The nature, collectability and status of fashion illustration

On a rainy evening, a large and avid audience was treated to behind the scenes revelations, and much insight about the state of contemporary fashion drawing. Chaired by Colin McDowell, the panel included gallerists Joëlle Chariau of Galerie Bartsch and Charian, and William Ling of Fashion Illustration Gallery, who kicked off by discussing the growing market for fashion drawings, both originals and prints.

Chariau declared that finding an audience isn’t the issue, but that finding the drawings is, as so much was originally made to commission. She recounted how, when she first opened her gallery, she prompted René Gruau to search his house and cupboards for “packages” of artwork, which he had never considered saleable.

Ling admitted that the collecting market is still nascent, much like the graffiti scene was a decade ago. But, he added, “the art market is starved of beautiful, hand-drawn work…when I show a new client the work, and explain it, it’s extremely powerful.” Both revealed that they sell to a number of fashion photographers, musing that they are attracted by what drawing can achieve, that photography cannot.
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From the Archive; Drawing Fashion at the Design Museum

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Drawing Fashion
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London SE1
Visited 5 November 2010

Drawing Fashion Eye Blog

Monday 4:47pm, 15 November 2010
“Beyond the body”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally published on Eye Blog

Fashion drawing lies between representation and abstraction

Fashion illustration may have been marginalised in the past (and it’s not just me saying so), but right now London is being treated to a series of exhibitions and events showcasing this very rarefied genre of commercial image-making. At the Design Museum, Drawing Fashion is an historical and scholarly exhibition featuring work from the extensive collection of gallerist, Joëlle Chariau, curated by fashion critic, Colin McDowell, and Nina Due of the Design Museum.

On show is an illuminating edit of original drawings, commissioned for editorial and advertising use, building into a concise history of the genre. From early Art Nouveau and Art Deco examples by Erté and André Édouard Marty, to George Lepape’s illustrated covers for Vogue (one features the “model” drawing the masthead onto the picture plane, behind her). René Gruau (famously of Dior), Eric and Christian Bérard represent the middle decades, when drawing was used by luxury brands in full-page print adverts, as well as to report seasonal trends right off the catwalk. The chronology reveals the glory years of “drawing fashion”, mirroring the most glamorous moments of twentieth century design.
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