House-trained Objects: Notes Toward Writing an Alternative History of Modern Art

Abstract

To start with a truism: homes in Britain contain objects valued by their owners. Some of these objects will have been purchased, some may be gifts. Some may be defined as luxuries, others as necessities, but it is the interplay between these goods which is important and through which individuals display discrimination, responsibility and agency in their role as consumer-collectors. Especially valued contemporary objects in any one British home may include paintings, prints, kitchen equipment, sound systems and so on. In 1997 the exhibition Modern Art in Britain 1910–1914 held at the Barbican Art Gallery, London attempted to recreate the crucial series of exhibitions of modern European art in London just before the First World War. Boundaries have to be drawn and, of course, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is where we expect to find twentieth- and twenty-first-century applied art and design intelligently presented.