There is nothing more perverse than a Design Museum. A place specifically given over to the display of things made for the ‘real world’ – things we would usually eat from, wear, sit on, drive or otherwise use. Here though, they will never be eaten from, worn, sat on, driven or otherwise used.
Things are so perverse inside design museums that we might even ask what they are actually for? Why have them? Why visit? What should we put in them? What should we do there? Is a museum of design such a perverted notion that it renders the very purpose of design redundant? Surely the rest of the world, anywhere but a design museum, is the best place to see real, live design in action?
As soon as an object enters the collection it is utterly transformed. By crossing the threshold of the museum, things become subject to an entirely different set of criteria. Subject not to the demands of the everyday world but to issues of museology, such as conservation, curation, interpretation and so on. These may be museums of applied arts, but the application of their collections – to the world at least – is diminished. Use becomes useless, context (other than that of the museum) is erased.
Even we are transformed as we enter the museum. We can look but not touch; consumers stranded in a palace of desire, denied the ability to sate our urge. But if we can’t use or acquire – our usual relationship to designed things – our role as viewer is amplified. Physically – and sensually – constrained by museum protocol, our relationship to objects is altered by the distance placed between us and them (which as often with restraint and suppression creates qualities of perversion and fetish). We are recast by the museum as spectator (to be entertained), pupil (to be taught) and connoisseur (to pass judgement). A museum, in other words, skews our view of design even as it tries to reveal it to us.
In a seminal essay on the development of the contemporary art gallery, Brian O’Doherty wrote: ‘The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art”. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.’ O’Doherty describes the essence of this art-space as a hybrid possessing ‘the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory [joined] with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics.’
In other words that familiar, hyper-refined and sophisticated generic space of the ‘white cube’ gallery is at once blank, and yet loaded with meaning. It is a space that evolved hand in hand with modern art itself. Indeed one might argue that the gallery precedes the artwork, as Damien Hirst suggested when he said ‘art is anything you put in an art gallery’.
Just as a design object is not an art object, however, a design museum is not an art gallery, similar though they may appear. We see many of the same devices and techniques of display in both: plinths, images on walls, vitrines. We see things arranged in space with deep consideration, we feel the control of the curator and, of course, the eyes of the invigilator upon us.
If the art gallery is an exceptional space outside of the world, a design museum is, by nature of the things it contains, a place that has at least one of its feet in the world. And while the art gallery is – according to O’Doherty – part church, part court and part lab, the design museum is something else. It’s a little like a shop (you may even own some of the things you see). Yet it’s also a museum of techniques – of the craft and technologies used to create things. And it’s a museum of anthropology, too, in the stories that objects tell us about human culture. It’s part school in how it wants to instruct us, part showroom in how it presents products and part immersive theatre in how it sometimes sets scenes. In a design museum we find ourselves in a far less singular environment than the art gallery. Just imagine how you walk through galleries arranged by geography, chronology and then media, as if the museum is slipping between modes, itself unable to decide what is actually the real value of design.
The schizophrenic nature of the design museum – from showcasing ‘good’ products to displaying treasured cultural artefacts and so on – is nothing new. In fact, it’s there at the very origin of the V&A, the world’s first applied art museum. The V&A itself emerged from the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, which gathered the finest (as well as the largest and the strangest) examples of culture and industry all under Joseph Paxton’s extraordinary structure of the Crystal Palace.
Contemporary illustrations give us a flavour of both the contents of the exhibition, its modes of display and the sheer grandeur of its spectacle. In one view of the Medieval Court we see historical theatrics intertwined with vitrines of gold and silver goblets, curtain swags, sculptures and ceramics set among foliage. In others we see the bounty of colonial nature in Australian hunting trophies, animal skins and bell jars full of taxidermied birds. We see ore specimens arranged next to cornucopian mounds of exotic Bahamian fruit. Another view shows row upon row of bulbous, ceramic pots from India alongside intricate rugs, themselves decorated with other layers of bright textiles. Banners proclaim an opulent recreation of a maharaja’s throne room, while in the British ‘Nave’ we find a lineup of spectacular non sequiturs, including a lighthouse, a huge fountain, a telescope and an ornate iron pergola.
The illustrations give a sense of raw display, of sheer volume and vast numbers. Of something between a pageant and a fair. Most striking, though, is the sense of space – of the vastness of the Palace that seems to fade to grey mist as it recedes into the distance, and the strange mixture of industrial structure that segues into fantastical wonderlands. Paxton’s glass-house provided a giant interior landscape displaying the power of Imperial Britain, where the newness of industrialization and globalization was magnified. It was a place where machines sat next to fragments of indigenous culture, where geography, technology, history and commerce bled into each other, all surrounded by vast crowds.
It was, as Charlotte Bronte wrote, ‘vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things’. She wrote too of the effect the spectacle had upon its visitors: ‘The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence.’ Cowed, we might imagine the new power of industry and production to collapse geography, control time, shape material and organize people.
The Crystal Palace was also a place where value was constructed right before your eyes – a whole new set of commercial, cultural and political values that had been unleashed by Victorian modernity. And it was this that Karl Marx clearly saw when he wrote in a review: ‘With this exhibition, the bourgeoisie of the world has erected in the modern Rome its Pantheon, where, with self-satisfied pride, it exhibits the gods which it has made for itself.’
As Marx suggests, the Great Exhibition was a significant Rubicon. One might imagine it as the moment the industrial revolution matured. The place where all of the new developments in technology, labour and capital were gathered en masse. Where the new phenomena of mechanized production and consumerism – and the creation of a new consumer class – were revealed in full, gleaming, modern effect.
Alongside pure spectacle, the exhibition had another explicit aim. It had been established in part to allowing British industrialists to learn from the best foreign examples to produce higher quality goods. When the V&A was formed, it also incorporated the Government School of Design. Thus, the V&A was at its outset – unlike other equivalent cultural institutions such as the British Museum or the National Gallery – an overtly educational enterprise. And its educational aims were aimed not only at enrolled students, but also the public at large.
Displays were explicitly pedagogical devices, intended to elevate the knowledge, expertise and taste of its visitors. The ‘Chamber of Horrors’, for example, was a collection put together to show ‘bad’ design. Through its curation and displays, the museum would chart a course through the complexity of modernity, using its museological, high-cultural status as a way of indicating morality, goodness and correctness. If the Great Exhibition had created a consumer class, the museum would now teach them how to be good consumers. The Great Exhibition was ostensibly an exhibition about manufacturing, but it served to manufacture an idea of the consumer within the complex machinations of Victorian industry and imperialism.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, where we are all good consumers. We enter the design museum not like visitors to the Great Exhibition to whom modernity was a new experience. We come as active and (mostly) willing participants in the systems and protocols of modernity, as consummate consumers of things, connoisseurs of the mass of available stuff.
So well-formed are we as consumer-citizens, that the job of the contemporary design museum is entirely different from its origins. Today, it acts in reverse, providing a space outside the the world of ‘use value’ and ‘market value’, in which we can interrogate our relationship to objects from a different perspective. An object inside the museum is revealed to be far more than just itself. The museum’s power to change our relationship with objects allows us to begin to unravel their significance into a range of environmental, technical, social, economic and political qualities.
Which is why the design museum still has more in common with the Great Exhibition than an art gallery. But instead of the shock and awe of Victorian industrialism that Bronte noted, instead of the monolithic presentation of a pantheon of particular values, the design museum is a place where the processes, ideologies and products of consumerism itself are displayed, and where we might see how design condenses vast systems, global supply chains, ideas of labour, relationships to natural resources, economics and more into things. The function of the display of things becomes a way to stage encounters with multiple ideas of what objects have been, are or might yet become.
While the design museum is ostensibly a place that houses objects, its real value is as a place to consider ourselves and our roles in the world. If the Great Exhibition helped to form a new kind of citizen at the height of Victorian progress, the job of a design museum now is to help us interrogate our relationships with industry, technology and commerce, as well as craft, materiality and form. And this is perhaps the museum’s real value. That its very perversity – the very fact that it alters our relationship to the things it tries to show us – is its real significance. Far more than simply showing us the world as it is, the design museum’s perverse value is the ways in which it can refract the possibilities of the present.
First published in the catalogue of Values of Design