Unmaking Things
Connective Collections
Curating Urbanism: The City as a Collection
Helen Cresswell, the editor of this column, in her article “Vagabonding in the V&A“, described our experience in the museum as, “losing all sense of time (and usually direction) in this sprawling treasure house”. In this article, I am going to try and push the definition of ‘collection’ and use the concept of a collection – and Helen’s description of the multi-faceted relationships we can have with collections – as a tool for analysing our experience of the city. In particular, I am going to try and ask, if the city is a collection, to what extent can we curate it?
Blue plaques - the city's museum labels. Photo credit © Helen Kearney 2012
The city, like the V&A, is a site in which we can lose all sense of time and direction, and it too can be a sprawling treasure house. As the host city of our course, this article will focus on London, a city that undeniably is such a house. The city-museum metaphor has obvious points of discussion – both require mapping to find your way, both have sometimes too many people packed into a small space, both have refreshment facilities. The collection of a museum consists of objects, but the collection of the city is buildings, streets, ephemera. Both collections require care and attention, and inevitably certain areas of the spaces will be closed off at certain times for refurbishment, and visitors’ plans will need to be changed to react to this. Both museums and cities have signage systems, and London’s ‘Blue Plaques’ provide a version of the museums’ labels, with their succinct description of the history of a building, explaining its significance. The V&A, perhaps particularly among museums, fulfils the city/museum metaphor nicely – its galleries are tiny neighbourhoods that feel completely different from each other despite rubbing shoulders; the jewellery gallery and the cast courts are separated by only a staircase, and yet are different worlds – not too unlike the distinction in London between the City and the east end. (more…)
Unmaking Us: Collecting the Abject
Wallpaper, Lancashire, c. 1853, Potters of Darwen, E.558-1980, V&A © 2012 Victoria and Albert Museum
Assuming all collections to comprise of beautiful things and exemplars would be a falsehood; design historians will be familiar with the infamous ‘chamber of horrors’, the Victorian museological experiment conducted by Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave and other design educators involved with the early development of the V&A. The chamber was a gallery exhibiting a carefully curated collection, an assemblage of 87 objects intended to orient the visitor upon their arrival at the Museum of Ornamental Manufactures at Marlborough House (the first incarnation of the V&A). Designing their route through the museum, Cole and company hoped to inculcate within the visitor the Government School of Design’s definitions of good and bad taste. This method of visual instruction only lasted 10 months before the chamber was closed in June 1853.
This collection of objects is now dispersed throughout the various departments of the museum; a few are still in possession of their original labels and numbers, fragments that act as a reminder of their past history, like this sample of wallpaper on the right. Revisiting the chamber and the horror within, let us explore some connecting ideas of horror, design and taste. Read on if you dare…
Textile Collections and the Sharing of Knowledge
Detail of Card Catalogue System compiled by Rachel Kay-Shuttleworth © 2011 The RBKS Textile Collection
The Textile Society settled in Oxford for the weekend of the 25-26 November 2011, to hold its annual conference at the Iannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies (in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum). In its 29th year, this year’s event was entitled ‘Textile Collections and the Sharing of Knowledge’, seeing the largest attendance in the Society’s history. The popularity of this subject indicates a broader appeal that goes beyond the Society’s membership. The purpose and aims of the conference are those shared by Unmaking Things; this post is intended to give a taste of this successful day of research, reviewing the papers and questions presented, and raises points that will hopefully invite further discussion for this column.
Pieces For Patchwork
Stamp Collecting
Detail of Stamp Album Page belonging to the Author, © 2011 Helen Cresswell
Inspired by a recent trip home, this post uses a very personal collection to bring postage stamps to the attention of design historians. This is a surprisingly neglected area, given that these objects connect to a wide range of key concepts and issues pertinent to our area of study. Perhaps their miniature scale belies this potential, for the tiny postage stamp is really a multifunctional site, a host to all kinds of ideas and messages. They employ visual codes that we have come to implicitly understand, using signs and symbols that we now instantly recognise. They represent real cash value, either when used to post a letter, or as the prize within the philatelist’s collection, capable of raising extraordinary sums at auction. Stamps might be the weapon of choice to conduct propaganda, wielded as a tool of branding; they can celebrate the identity of a nation, and can convey iconic images of power and state. They can be issued as a formal act of remembrance or commemoration. These things are agents that facilitate human communication; their ability to travel and circulate over large distances combined with the ease of their mass production means they are very effective mechanisms of design. (more…)
The Textile Study Collection, room 100 of the V&A, being disassembled © 2011 Helen Cresswell
‘…museums of capital cities and secondary towns abroad, of Paris and the provinces, famous collections and little-known private ones, the cabinets of amateurs and of forbidding people, we rummaged and raked up, we examined everything.’ generic cialis australia
This is a nineteenth-century definition of ‘vagabonding’, a splendid word coined by a collector to describe the process of conducting research, which perfectly encapsulates the work we do as students on the V&A/RCA History of Design MA programme. We travel near and far, trawling all kinds of archives, libraries, museums and collections, assembling the evidence we need to create a convincing piece of written work, in our own specialized branch of making at the RCA.
But most of the time you will find us vagabonding in the V&A; when we are not reading in the National Art Library we take pleasure in exploring the museum’s collections, losing all sense of time (and usually direction) in this sprawling treasure house. We not only comb the galleries, but sift through the thousands of objects collected together upon the V&A website, trying to select that all-important Early Modern object for our first-term essay. The students choose all manner of things, championing the weird and wonderful, connecting to them in a very personal way. We create maps in our own heads, taking preferred routes that take us past particular displays and objects. buy cialis bangladesh
