Disobedient Objects

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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. I had no idea how the exhibition design would look at future venues for Disobedient Objects, so the mounts would need to be easily adaptable. 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.

A group of women artists who, in 1985, set out to expose racism, sexism and corruption in the art world There are found objects, such as the saucepans and lids used in Argentinian protests. The catalogue, quoting Bachelard again, says the exhibition is of "many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely". They range from folk art, for example, signs made by people for protest marches to the very high-tech, such as mobile phone-powered drones for filming demonstrations or the police, which you can make yourself very cheaply. The exhibits on display are perhaps more objects for disobedience, rather than disobedient objects. But that’s no bad thing, especially as it accomplishes a richer, more challenging display than last year’s disappointing Art Turning Left: 1789-2013 at Tate Liverpool. Painted banners and placards featuring humorous or evocative slogans have also been selected. Chilean Arpilleras wall hanging: Dónde están nuestros hijos, Chile Roberta Bacic's collection. Photograph by Martin Melaugh

The total visitor figures for ‘Disobedient Objects’ during its six-month display at the V&A was 416,867. There was no damage to any objects or need to introduce any contingency measures. The comprehensive planning and discussion which began at the V&A continued with tour venues to ensure all subsequent installs, de-installs and displays ran smoothly. The utilitarian aesthetic of the user manual finds its way into a series of how-to guides – illustrated instructions to make objects featured in the exhibition. These guides were applied to the invitations and are available as well as tear-off sheets in the exhibition itself. Clair, myself and Line (Exhibition Designer) met with Sarah and Amy from the Exhibitions department to go through each of the objects individually. Line, Clair and myself created mount ideas that would fit with the design aesthetic of Disobedient Objects but would not cause harm to the object throughout the 6 months of the exhibition’s duration. DIY drones, subversive textiles from Chile and shields that look like books are just some of the objects on display at an exhibition that examines the role of design in political activism. We interviewed the show’s curator Gavin Grindon. You can read our review of the exhibition here 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 show is about existing design so it made sense to use a documentary approach to find examples of things that have actually been made," Grindon explained. "None of this stuff is professionally designed, it's just happening in the public sphere in various ways." L J Roberts, Gaybashers, Come and Get It, USA. Image courtesy of Blanca Garcia Others are propaganda, such as a trade union banner or the 1986 leaflet (produced by London Greenpeace and, it later turned out, an undercover police officer) that sparked the interminable McLibel trial. Testing an inflatable hammer made by Eclectic Electric Collective at the Berlin Mauer Park, 2010. Photo: Jakub Simcik But is this yet another co-opting of the counter-culture by the establishment? As I arrived, my scepticism was challenged by two panels of ceramic collage flanking the museum’s entrance. Commissioned from the West London artist, Carrie Reichardt, they each depict a protestor holding up a shield decorated to look like a book cover against the baton-wielding figures of riot police with fifty pound notes collaged in their visors. The book-shields bear the slogans ‘History is a Weapon’, ‘Nothing is inevitable, Everything is Possible’ and ‘Power to the People’, ‘Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, Rather it is a hammer to shape it’, and seemed to announce that disobedience was not only possible, but also desirable. 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?As with all successful projects, time for comprehensive, collaborative planning is fundamental. Complex objects, second guessing the unknown and tight deadlines can add considerably to workloads. The lenders (some of whom needed to remain anonymous) and the object types were a little more unconventional than usual. For instance, we knew many of the objects had been produced in reaction to a particular event, made with materials at hand and, due to their use, were potentially quite fragile. Some of the challenges raised during early-stage group discussions included: 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 As several artists and observers at the exhibit preview noted, there is a time for peaceful protest, and a time for action. This is just one of many strategies for protest on display at the V&A's “Disobedient Objects,” an exhibition of art and design works created as tools of social change. Items on display range from simple tools—tear gas masks made out of water bottles, a saucepan lid banged in conjunction with hundreds of others to form an Argentinian “noise protest,”—to more complex works, such as a mobile phone game which asks the user to participate in a series of atrocities. Arranged around a high-ceilinged room in four sections (“Making worlds,” “Solidarity,” “Direct action,” and “A multitude of struggles,”), together these objects illustrate the ingenuity of radical movements and oppressed peoples around the world. 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.

The most memorable are those that turn the actions of their enemies against themselves. There are the book bloc shields, which are protective shields decorated with enlarged images of the front cover of books (Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man) such that riot police are obliged to belabour Literature and Knowledge with their truncheons. There are the dwarf hats worn by opponents of the Polish regime in the 1980s, which, as all protests were illegal, put the police in the position of arresting people for the crime of dressing as dwarves in large numbers.

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This banner opposes the idea of a mere financial crisis, identifying capitalism as the source of climate chaos and ongoing inequality and injustice Handmade gas masks were an essential response to police actions during the 2013 mass protests in Istanbul. These events saw the Turkish government release a record amount of tear gas to disperse demonstrators. Protesters devised a way to protect themselves with basic materials like plastic bottles, elastic, and strips of insulation foam. Dónde están nuestros hijos (“Where are our children?”). Chilean Arpilleras wall hanging, Roberta Bacic collection. Photo: Martin Melaugh

For me, this piece is all about trying to tell the people’s history of civil disobedience and dissent in a kind of a ceramic way. We’re trying to make these two big pieces that from a distance - when you look at them - they just show the aggression of the state oppression, of authority. Isabel Hardingham is a part-time Gallery Assistant at the V&A, a role that she combines with being Senior Bookshop Associate at the Architectural Association Bookshop. Working inside the Disobedient Objects exhibition, she reflects on the impact that the Guerrilla Girls made on her as an art history student and on the ongoing relevance of their work Poster, Guerrilla Girls, 1989 After this photograph was taken, each mount was then taken off to be lacquered and left to dry for 24 hours. I then threaded shrinkable tubing onto the wire and moulded these evenly into place using a heat gun, which was done to avoid any metal snagging against the fabric of the doll. Testing out the mount in the museum workshop. Sadly, this is my final post on the museum blog for Disobedient Objects…but before I move on to new adventures, I’d like to give you a little glimpse into more of the behind-the-scenes work involved in the run up to Disobedient Objects. I am going to focus a little bit into two very simple mounts I made prior to the show’s opening last month. This cannot work in all situations obviously, says van Balen. In Palestine, for instance, where the threats are real -- using humour is not exactly a straightforward thing, when battling a cause that can so often turn deadly. He points, however, to a movement in 2010 when Palestinians dressed like Na'vis around the release of James Cameron's film Avatar. Painted in blue, they compared themselves to the repressed Na'vi people. "That creative interpretation was very powerful because of the storytelling involved," said van Balen.

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Social movements, in contesting established ways of seeing and acting, find themselves beset by a long and recent history of misrepresentation, in which they are ignored or maligned by mass media while simultaneously being appropriated for their vitality and authenticity. Museums are not immune to this process. In our approach we were inspired by the traditions of history from below, but also by methods of participatory action research, as ways to engage with ongoing movements. These admittedly awkward terms stand for rejecting institutional privilege and assumed expertise. We aimed to be guided by their principals of aiming to shape research as a socially-just activity that researches with, rather than on, communities; recognising participants as experts and opening the curation process to be fundamentally shaped by them. This involved a series of workshops, with lenders and other movement participants who had a connection to these objects, which shaped the exhibition’s ideas and physical design. Some exhibits employ the charm of something woven or crafted, such as the arpilleras, the appliqued textiles made first in Chile and then in other places, that commemorate people taken away by ruling regimes and other atrocities. With these, the labour and care taken in making them commands respect and disarms aggression.