V&A East Collection Review – An Amazing Wealth of Inspiration to Motivate Future Geniuses | Victoria and Albert

HeyOutside the new site of the Victoria and Albert Museum in east London, an ordinary young man gazes out at the old Olympic Park. The five-metre-tall sculpture is generic in design, a combination of “photos, 3D scans and observations” of local residents. It’s easy to see why Thomas J. Price’s idea would appeal to a museum keen to engage with the region’s diverse communities – here is the essence of East London’s youth, executed at the level of Michelangelo’s David – but by smoothing out differences between individuals, it sends a confusing message.

Aggregating data and identifying commonalities is, ultimately, the logic of the algorithm. So the worry is that this museum will also be guessing its audience’s desires based on predictive models, steering visitors toward things they tend to “like” and away from opinions they presumably don’t share. Therefore, it is comforting to find, upon entering the building, a vision of how the people and cultures you meet are created, a vision that is richer, more diverse and more open than those first impressions suggest.

The first two exhibitions showcasing items from the new museum’s collection are a treat. An eye-catching structural rug by Eileen Gray plays with Derek Jarman’s punk designs and costumes by Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo. However, even these are topped off by Althea McNish’s exquisite printed fabrics, which show how a designer working within the infrastructures of mass production had a more profound influence on the look of post-war Britain than any number of haute couture designers. Here’s a prime example of how difference — in an accompanying video McNish talks about bringing the colors of her native Trinidad to her new home — not only enriches culture, but defines it.

More topics appear. The placement of a Japanese painted screen recording the arrival of European sailors next to a tapestry documenting the 2011 Egyptian Revolution suggests that attention will be paid to colonial expansion and imperial violence, two things that haunt the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection. The display, which explores William Morris’s connection to nearby Walthamstow, suggests that objects will always be linked to the place where they were produced. Like McNish, who produced textile patterns for British Railways as well as Liberty prints, Morris showed how incorporating art into the fabric of everyday experience could improve the living conditions of everyone in society.

That our well-being is a function of our environments is exemplified by a wooden curvy chair from a sanitarium designed by Alvar Aalto, while the unusual talismanic shirt, inscribed with the entire text of the Qur’an, provides another example of how everyday items can be invested with restorative properties. Arakawa and Ginz’s model of the “life-extending villa,” which reimagines the home as an obstacle course to keep residents smart, offers an elegant metaphor for a curatorial strategy that encourages visitors to choose their own path and make their own connections. Not everything works, but the principle is impressive.

It also indicates the true value of the museum. As a resident of the town, I can attest that the one thing Hackney doesn’t lack is that creative people “celebrate their creativity” (they regularly celebrate their creativity in my building, for example, when I’m trying to sleep). But looking beyond the language of the press release, it is clear that the museum curators did not mistake the arrival of a new museum in this part of London as the arrival of culture. Instead, they position the museum as something akin to a toolbox or kitten, a shared box of precedents and models that aspiring artists and designers are invited to raid.

It’s easy to imagine, for example, how a shirt woven entirely from salmon skin by a Nivek artisan could inspire a young designer working with renewable materials; Or how Claude Cahun’s photomontage can encourage a young man bound by the identity determined by society. The most useful resource for those who want to change the future is always the past. The Bamboo House by Indonesian architecture practice Ibuko is a model of how a new generation of designers is returning to traditions that were suppressed during modernism in order to renegotiate our relationship to each other and to the natural world.

Entering Black Music: A British Story, the museum’s inaugural temporary exhibition, you receive headphones equipped with a sensor that guides you through this maze of videos, costumes, sculptures and photographs with the songs that chronicle them. This remarkable attempt to trace the multiple musical cultures that resulted from the violent displacement of African people due to the slave trade is inevitably a victim of its own broad ambition. But within this necessarily comprehensive history of black music are the seeds of many other exhibitions, from the media hysteria surrounding the birth of grime at the turn of the century to 2 Tone and the anti-racist coalitions of the late 1970s.

Perhaps this seeding of ideas is the point – because “Music is Black” establishes an exhibition model well-suited to the institution. A relevant story of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s colonial history is told through and contested by the culture from which it emerged. The combination of powerful music and contextual information produces the complexity that only comes when senses and thought are forced to operate at the same time and cannot find harmony.

The show does not attempt to reconcile the horrors of the slave trade or the racism experienced by black Britons with the music that emerged from those experiences. Instead, the visitor is asked to keep these two things in mind and body, and to consider the ability of music to express suffering even when it evokes joy.