Disobedient Objects

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The Guerrilla Girls became an all-female force in the art world in the mid-1980’s. They have devoted nearly thirty years to feminist and anti-racist concerns. The V&A is fortunate to have one of their early works on display as part of the exhibition Disobedient Objects: ‘Do Women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.’ The Guerrilla Girls display within the V&A exhibition Disobedient Objects, 2014 made by Ed Hall for “UNITE”‚ which was the biggest march in North West England against the privatisation of the English National Health Service (NHS). (Photo courtesy Ed Hall) 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

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. Objects 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 Disobedient objects are often those which are simply to hand and waiting to be re-purposed. These masks made from water bottles were used during last year’s Gezi Park protests in Istanbul as a response to the unprecedented amounts of teargas used against protestors in Taksim Square, and became symbolic – they were featured in street art and graffiti and there are photographs of whirling dervishes wearing them. Dónde están nuestros hijos (“Where are our children?”). Chilean Arpilleras wall hanging, Roberta Bacic collection. Photo: Martin Melaugh Now, to move on to the Zapatista Dolls; these are quite different for the process involved. Shortly before I started focusing entirely on Disobedient Objects, I was actually mount making for the Small Stories exhibition at the Museum of Childhood, where I made mounts for objects like this little guy here:

26 July 2014 - 1 February 2015

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 Bread and Puppet Theatre argues that culture should not belong to the elite but be for everyone Reichardt describes herself as an ‘extreme craftivist and renegade potter’. The intervention was made over a short, intense period and mobilised the skills of a collective of mosaic artists. The objects that will be exhibited were created by non-professional designers, mostly using craft methods or adhoc manufacturing processes. Testing an inflatable hammer made by Eclectic Electric Collective at the Berlin Mauer Park, 2010. Photo: Jakub Simcik 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.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. Andy Dao and Ivan Cash's Occupy George overprinted dollar bill, 2011. Photograph: courtesy Andy Dao and Ivan Cash 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. It would be good to know more about what worked and how well. Some of the movements represented were spectacularly successful, such as the suffragettes, gay rights, Solidarnosc and the anti-apartheid campaigns, whereas protests against what is now called neoliberalism, their themes remarkably consistent over the decades, don't seem to have got very far. You wonder to what degree design played a role in both successes and failures. There is, finally, an unintended consequence of the proximity of artistic and political radicalism – it's possible to blur one with the other and be too easily satisfied with something that looks as if it is changing the world, when it's not.

A group of women artists who, in 1985, set out to expose racism, sexism and corruption in the art world Often, the most simple of ideas prove to be the most effective, so I’ll talk through the process of making a mount for one of the Bust cards featured in the exhibition.

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Weekly updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. Dezeen Awards Bavarian sociologist Max Weber defines a state as any community which effectively commands a monopoly on violence. For Weber, the so-called “grassroots” and “establishment” exist across a single spectrum of power struggles. Arguably the designs in this exhibition are neither objects of disobedience nor obedience, but simply objects of agency tuned to their creators’ circumstances. The curated shoe-slingshot is ultimately as much a designed object of social control as the un-curated tanks it is used against. When we have talked about the project, we have often been met with surprise. It many ways it feels counter-intuitive for this exhibition to appear in “the world’s greatest museum of art and design,” founded at the height of British colonialism and which predominantly displays objects of elite consumption. The project has been described to us an institutional critique and there is inevitably some truth in this. It also prompts a question about recuperation. In the nineteenth century it was claimed that museums could prevent riots, sedition and drunkenness by mopping up working class leisure time. What happens when you place disobedient objects at the heart of a building that was conceived for such obedient purposes? Talking about movements outside of the reach of those movements always involves discomfort. This exhibition forces the question of what a museum does to disobedient objects and what disobedient objects do to a museum? These objects embody the kinds of knowledge Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons.’Exhibiting them we test the museum’s claim to truly be a public institution for learning and debate. 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.