Both are firmly not high art, and although the political significance of the latter is much less overt, these objects belong to the same strand of dedicated difference that 'the people' carve out for themselves against a background of establishment and corporate aesthetics.
Caroline Coon invited me as her guest to the opening, and we drank pear and apple juice as we mingled with assorted artists, intellectuals and media people. We chatted to Paul Gorman (www.paulgormanis.com) whose informative blog will take you on a tour of the exhibition itself.
Apart from Caroline's Bust Card, which she used to distribute alongside other members of Release so that those who were busted could make contact, there are many other extraordinary objects on display. For more information see the February 2014 blog post at http://carolinecoon.com/news.htm.
I also liked the customised anti-death-penalty car and the Trade Union banner; there were badges, a suffragette tea cup and saucer, a Palestinian slingshot made from the tongue of a child's shoe, instruction leaflets for improvised tear-gas masks, and many other mostly small objects of significance, which could otherwise have not been 'joined up' into a thread of dissent, as the speaker told us.
I'm delighted to see Caroline honoured in this way; being principled about one's beliefs can lead to a lot of opposition and there is something pleasing about these objects of revolution appearing in a building that was set up as a hymn to Empire and British authority.
This is the link to the V&A http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/
1 comment:
Very pretty, the pair of you!
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