This gallery contains 22 photos.
This gallery illustrates my whistle-stop trip to Tallinn, Estonia. I was invited to deliver a paper at a seminar, part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Art Triennial, for an edited version of that paper, see here. This post is about … Continue reading
From the V&A’s Search the Collections website, using the keyword ‘Circ’. Cabinet, made in 1861 by Richard Norman Shaw. CIRC.96.1 to 12-1963. (Accessioned by the Circulation Department in 1963). ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Originally published on Bloomsbury Visual Arts Blog in July 2016, Joanna Weddell reflects on comments made by the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Roth, on the occasion of the museum winning the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2016 award. Joanna co-edited Design Objects and the Museum with me, which is published by Bloomsbury Academic, and available here.
‘The V&A Circulation Department and Museum of the Year 2016’
by Joanna Weddell
Bloomsbury Visual Arts Blog
On 6 July 2016 Martin Roth, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, announced a plan ‘to revive the Museum’s legendary Circulation Department’. As a member of the Museum’s Research Department, I was delighted to hear a clear reference to the subject of my chapter in Design Objects and the Museum, co-edited with Liz Farrelly (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2016).
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This gallery contains 33 photos.
Outside looking in, the glazed facade of Brighton’s premier flea market, Snoopers Paradise (“Snoopers”), projects domestic objects right into the street. Close-up window-shopping is only possible out of hours when external stalls have been packed away, but it draws people … Continue reading
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
“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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Composite
Two Columbia Road
2 Columbia Road, London E2
20 to 25 September 2011
“Composite is both verb and noun, an action and an outcome, a process and a finished product. Within it are roots and hints of other words — compose, composition, posit, position, site and compare — all of which relate to art, architecture, fashion and design. This exhibition brings together a disparate group of creatives who’ve crossed those borders, gone beyond all comfort zones. Often working in collaboration, they’ve mutated their practice to produce hybridised, surprising solutions.
Questioning traditional processes, reusing discarded materials, exploring overlooked technologies, composing disparate elements, exposing the artificial, celebrating the mundane; these are just some of their tactics. The end results, the works on show, are diverse but they share two things in common, a degree of intricacy and ‘a way in’. They’re not exclusive, instead we’re encouraged to engage and play, inspect and manipulate, delve and re-arrange. Complex, interactive, considered, non-precious; this work is of its time. We live in a composite world.”
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