Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The general consensus, gleaned from critics' reviews and visitors' blogs, is that the Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Modernism exhibition is 'spectacular'. And while visitor numbers can't necessarily be taken as an indicator of quality, the show is certainly pulling them in.
This has to be good news for the V&A. Despite culture minister David Lammy's recent celebration of increasing numbers of visitors at the nationals, South Kensington's monthly figures for 2005/06 are generally down on those for 2004/05.
The V&A had intended to encourage new audiences by focusing on the contemporary using the Spiral extension as a gateway. Since those plans were abandoned in 2004, it has clearly come to regard high-profile modernism exhibitions as a viable alternative. Cold War: Modern Art & Design in a Divided World 1945-1975 is scheduled for 2008, and will presumably pick up where Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 leaves off.
The V&A isn't the only London museum to recognise modernism's appeal. Two other major exhibitions are covering similar territory: Tate Modern's Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (until 4 June) and the Design Museum's Designing Modern Britain (until 26 November, see Museums Journal February 2006, p44).
Drawing comparisons is irresistible. The V&A's exhibition is distinguished by its installation, its scholarliness and the quality and scope of its content. It includes paintings, photography, film, architecture, the performing arts, furniture, typographic design, machinery, and emphasises lifestyle aspirations manifest in body culture, mass communication, urban fashion, transport and interior design.
Highlights include the earliest surviving fitted kitchen, found recently in Frankfurt; a silver Czech Tatra T-87; early x-ray machines; a futurist suit by Giacomo Balla; and Alexander Rodchenko's productivist outfit. While it may not quite cover the 'world', as implied by its sub-title, it focuses on a wide geographic area: Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Britain and America.
The show has also been distinguished by the extraordinary amount of heated discussion it has generated in the media - though, as Deyan Sudjic (the incoming director of London's Design Museum) argued in the Observer newspaper, most is less about the show and more about whether modernism was a good thing.
While that's hardly an original debate, in the context of an exhibition it raises questions about curatorial intentions and decisions made about the scope and content of interpretation.
The debate seems to have been prompted by an opinionated review by Simon Jenkins. In the Guardian newspaper he described Modernism as 'the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art. It opens with a word that says it all - utopia - and ends with an unspoken lie, that this nihilist ideology merely became a style and is no longer a threat. If only'.
For Sudjic, the fact that an exhibition could have provoked a public debate is remarkable. He credits Christopher Wilk, the curator, with having 'achieved what for any museum struggling to persuade the public to buy more tickets is the holy grail of exhibition making. He has managed to ignite a public row on a scale that he could never have predicted, even in his most optimistic dreams'.
But neither Wilk nor the curators at the Tate or the Design Museum opted to scrutinise the politics of modernism, despite acknowledging the context within which their displays originated. For the visitors to their exhibitions, this results in mixed messages.
All three modernism exhibitions centre on the cultural supremacy of the artist. At the V&A the avant-garde is presented as a benign force which in the aftermath of the first world war and the Russian Revolution 'dreamed of a new world, free of conflict, greed and social inequality'.
But the way that they are represented in the exhibition suggests that the approach of the artists and designers was more determined than this implies. And yet, the interpretation provided never questions the assumption that artists had the right, ability and authority to order the 'new world' and the lives of others; nor does it consider whether their intentions qualified as democratic, authoritarian or even merely good.
If anything, the V&A promotes modernism as neutral, capable of representing different allegiances: 'It is closely associated with left-wing politics and proved surprisingly acceptable to different political systems including dictatorships'. And it sees its evolution as culminating in mass market appeal 'stripped of its social ideals'.
None of the information provided gratis at the exhibition goes beyond such crass generalisations. Even the catalogue, also edited by Wilk (hardback £45 and weighing in about 5lbs), evades the issue. Perhaps all will be revealed in presentations promised in a forthcoming conference at the V&A (14-15 July).
So where does this leave the average visitor? It's unclear what messages the V&A wants its audiences to take away. The exhibition is, first and foremost, a celebration of modernist aesthetics. One gets the impression that the museum's corporate preference is for non-confrontational content - and that, in this case, the curator loves the style, but doesn't necessarily buy the rhetoric. Indeed, there's plenty to suggest that a sceptical approach has been deployed in relation to certain manifestations of modernism.
Once visitors have negotiated the heavily congested first section, they are rewarded by the delightfully ludicrous Triadic Ballet (designed by Oskar Schlemmer in 1922); footage of Rudolf Laban dancing; and Sonia Delaunay's wonderfully impractical knitted halter-neck swimsuit. The seriousness and beauty of many of the objects is countered by the nightmare scenarios of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936).
Even the idealism, characteristic of early modernism, is undermined by a series of quotations by the architect, Bruno Taut, which are scattered throughout the installation. I assumed that these were meant to come across as ironic and indicative of the modernists' frustrated ambitions. 'Women', he insisted in a quote from 1926 placed next to the earliest fitted kitchen, 'must sweep away all domestic nostalgia and make a new beginning'.
The richness of the exhibition invites visitors to scratch below the surface, but it's hard for the non-specialist to find answers to the questions that are raised. At a time when museums promote themselves as educational, and encourage visitors to attribute meanings to the objects displayed, perhaps more needs to be invested in closing the gap between curators and audiences.
Sara Selwood is the head of the department of cultural policy and management at City University and the editor of Cultural Trends
Project data
Sponsor: Habitat
Curator: Christopher Wilk
Exhibition design: Eva Jiricna Architects
Graphic design: Pentagram
AV designer, producer and researcher: General Observation
Exhibition ends: 23 July
The general consensus, gleaned from critics' reviews and visitors' blogs, is that the Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Modernism exhibition is 'spectacular'. And while visitor numbers can't necessarily be taken as an indicator of quality, the show is certainly pulling them in.
This has to be good news for the V&A. Despite culture minister David Lammy's recent celebration of increasing numbers of visitors at the nationals, South Kensington's monthly figures for 2005/06 are generally down on those for 2004/05.
The V&A had intended to encourage new audiences by focusing on the contemporary using the Spiral extension as a gateway. Since those plans were abandoned in 2004, it has clearly come to regard high-profile modernism exhibitions as a viable alternative. Cold War: Modern Art & Design in a Divided World 1945-1975 is scheduled for 2008, and will presumably pick up where Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 leaves off.
The V&A isn't the only London museum to recognise modernism's appeal. Two other major exhibitions are covering similar territory: Tate Modern's Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (until 4 June) and the Design Museum's Designing Modern Britain (until 26 November, see Museums Journal February 2006, p44).
Drawing comparisons is irresistible. The V&A's exhibition is distinguished by its installation, its scholarliness and the quality and scope of its content. It includes paintings, photography, film, architecture, the performing arts, furniture, typographic design, machinery, and emphasises lifestyle aspirations manifest in body culture, mass communication, urban fashion, transport and interior design.
Highlights include the earliest surviving fitted kitchen, found recently in Frankfurt; a silver Czech Tatra T-87; early x-ray machines; a futurist suit by Giacomo Balla; and Alexander Rodchenko's productivist outfit. While it may not quite cover the 'world', as implied by its sub-title, it focuses on a wide geographic area: Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Britain and America.
The show has also been distinguished by the extraordinary amount of heated discussion it has generated in the media - though, as Deyan Sudjic (the incoming director of London's Design Museum) argued in the Observer newspaper, most is less about the show and more about whether modernism was a good thing.
While that's hardly an original debate, in the context of an exhibition it raises questions about curatorial intentions and decisions made about the scope and content of interpretation.
The debate seems to have been prompted by an opinionated review by Simon Jenkins. In the Guardian newspaper he described Modernism as 'the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art. It opens with a word that says it all - utopia - and ends with an unspoken lie, that this nihilist ideology merely became a style and is no longer a threat. If only'.
For Sudjic, the fact that an exhibition could have provoked a public debate is remarkable. He credits Christopher Wilk, the curator, with having 'achieved what for any museum struggling to persuade the public to buy more tickets is the holy grail of exhibition making. He has managed to ignite a public row on a scale that he could never have predicted, even in his most optimistic dreams'.
But neither Wilk nor the curators at the Tate or the Design Museum opted to scrutinise the politics of modernism, despite acknowledging the context within which their displays originated. For the visitors to their exhibitions, this results in mixed messages.
All three modernism exhibitions centre on the cultural supremacy of the artist. At the V&A the avant-garde is presented as a benign force which in the aftermath of the first world war and the Russian Revolution 'dreamed of a new world, free of conflict, greed and social inequality'.
But the way that they are represented in the exhibition suggests that the approach of the artists and designers was more determined than this implies. And yet, the interpretation provided never questions the assumption that artists had the right, ability and authority to order the 'new world' and the lives of others; nor does it consider whether their intentions qualified as democratic, authoritarian or even merely good.
If anything, the V&A promotes modernism as neutral, capable of representing different allegiances: 'It is closely associated with left-wing politics and proved surprisingly acceptable to different political systems including dictatorships'. And it sees its evolution as culminating in mass market appeal 'stripped of its social ideals'.
None of the information provided gratis at the exhibition goes beyond such crass generalisations. Even the catalogue, also edited by Wilk (hardback £45 and weighing in about 5lbs), evades the issue. Perhaps all will be revealed in presentations promised in a forthcoming conference at the V&A (14-15 July).
So where does this leave the average visitor? It's unclear what messages the V&A wants its audiences to take away. The exhibition is, first and foremost, a celebration of modernist aesthetics. One gets the impression that the museum's corporate preference is for non-confrontational content - and that, in this case, the curator loves the style, but doesn't necessarily buy the rhetoric. Indeed, there's plenty to suggest that a sceptical approach has been deployed in relation to certain manifestations of modernism.
Once visitors have negotiated the heavily congested first section, they are rewarded by the delightfully ludicrous Triadic Ballet (designed by Oskar Schlemmer in 1922); footage of Rudolf Laban dancing; and Sonia Delaunay's wonderfully impractical knitted halter-neck swimsuit. The seriousness and beauty of many of the objects is countered by the nightmare scenarios of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936).
Even the idealism, characteristic of early modernism, is undermined by a series of quotations by the architect, Bruno Taut, which are scattered throughout the installation. I assumed that these were meant to come across as ironic and indicative of the modernists' frustrated ambitions. 'Women', he insisted in a quote from 1926 placed next to the earliest fitted kitchen, 'must sweep away all domestic nostalgia and make a new beginning'.
The richness of the exhibition invites visitors to scratch below the surface, but it's hard for the non-specialist to find answers to the questions that are raised. At a time when museums promote themselves as educational, and encourage visitors to attribute meanings to the objects displayed, perhaps more needs to be invested in closing the gap between curators and audiences.
Sara Selwood is the head of the department of cultural policy and management at City University and the editor of Cultural Trends
Project data
Sponsor: Habitat
Curator: Christopher Wilk
Exhibition design: Eva Jiricna Architects
Graphic design: Pentagram
AV designer, producer and researcher: General Observation
Exhibition ends: 23 July
