11 Classic Examples of Design for Political Protest
On July 26, just rooms away from the porcelain china and 18th century brocade gowns found in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection, will be a tear-gas mask and graffiti stencils. The scrappy, guerrilla-made pieces are part of a new exhibit called Disobedient Objects. In it, the museum’s curators are exploring how, since the late 1970s, political protest has spurred the creation of new design and technology.
There will be 99 objects in the London exhibit. Visitors will see lock-ons, used by members of Greenpeace to latch themselves onto buildings in protest of demolition. They’ll see textiles woven by Chilean women during the Pinochet regime of the 1970s, with hieroglyphic-like patterns that detail the tortures and economic suffering. And they’ll see “bucket bombs,” used in South African cities to discreetly disperse flyers containing information censored by the government.
Museums often show graphic design work used for political activism. Three-dimensional pieces like tear-gas masks and lock-ons haven’t gotten the same treatment. “People might keep posters under their bed, but not giant papier mache heads,” says Catherine Flood, one of the show’s curators. Plus, the work was never made to be ogled: “People who made these [objects] didn’t want them to go into museums, they made them in the context of the street.” Finding these pieces meant that Flood and her co-curator Gavin Grindon, a Kingston University professor who has spent the last ten years researching objects used during protest, had to take a grassroots approach. They reached out to activist groups, who in turn put them in touch with other activists around the world.
Flood and Grindon deemed objects significant if they were made at what Flood calls the “zero point of political art”—meaning made on the ground, not later as a commentary—and if they influenced other movements elsewhere. Thirty years after women in Chile embroidered their Pinochet-era textiles, women in Colombia picked up the technique to document a massacre. Likewise, book blocs were first seen in Italy in 2010, when students protested budget cuts to the university system. Used as shields, students would paint a piece of cardboard to look like the cover of their favorite novel. If they come into contact with police, it creates the inflammatory image of police figuratively destroying books. British, and then American, students saw the tactic online, and began adopting it for their own protests against tuition hikes.
Disobedient Objects only dates back to the late 1970s, when Flood says digital technology led to more creative kinds of protests than the picket lines associated with the 1960s. In that way too, the exhibit marks an unconventional approach to curating: rather than waiting for works to age, and collecting them to tell a retrospective story, many of these objects come with a contemporary narrative that’s not yet finished (to wit: there’s a smartphone-wielding drone on display). To hammer that point in, the curators purposefully built an incomplete exhibit: “We’re not trying to create the final word,” Flood says. “There’s 99 objects but we left space for 100, because the exhibit run for six months, and we wanted to acknowledge the fact that material is ongoing.”
Disobedient Objects will be on view until February 1, 2015.