Disobedient Objects Research Articles

Curating with Counterpowers

AbstractThis article examines the turn in Anglophone protest cultures since 2007 toward curating, museums, and heritage: a rise in the toppling of statues, demonstrations inside museums, and the creation of exhibitions, displays, and archives within the ephemeral spaces of protest camps and other mobilizations. The author argues for the historical causes of this curatorial turn in movement cultures, examines the structural power dynamics of this extrainstitutional curating vis-à-vis the practices and policies of cultural institutions, and puts these developments in critical dialogue with recent debates on “activist curating” and “institutional liberation.” Lastly, drawing on this analysis and firsthand experiences on both sides of this dynamic (as a core member of the collective Liberate Tate and as cocurator of the V&A exhibition Disobedient Objects), the author assesses this trajectory's potentials and limits as a cultural strategy for social change.

Changing the Rhythm of Design Capitalism and the Total Aestheticization of the World

AbstractIn his article “Changing the Rhythm of Design Capitalism and the Total Aestheticization of the World” Márton Szentpéteri intends to highlight the most important stages of the accelerating total aestheticization of the world resulting at the contemporary period of neoliberal design culture. In the age of design capitalism, the hegemony of consumption culture is being constantly maintained by a culture industry substantially expressed by and embodied in design. The paper claims that the eminent reason of the crisis of democracy today is rooted in the global society of the designed spectacle with its one-dimensional citizens loosing almost all abilities to recognize and consequently defend their rights and to decrease their alienation from real needs, responsibilities and sensibilities. Democracy is fading due to neoliberal globalization – especially in the case of the commercialization of the public sector. However, the particular role of design in this process has hitherto been neglected or underestimated. Against the trend of fading democracy, different sorts of design activism experimenting with disobedient objects and strategies of critical design point towards a much-awaited rebirth of art in terms of its compensatory power against damages of our lifeworld generated by the modernization process with globalisation in the lead. These endeavours are in harmony with the return of art in terms of emergency aesthetics. This rebirth can also be reinforced by the defence of the values of liberal learning being so much threatened amid a global higher education crisis, and especially by understanding design education in the frameworks of liberal learning rather than vocational training.

<em>Objetos desobedientes</em>: escraches y la lucha por la vivienda en la PAH

Este artículo describe la cultura material de la campaña de escraches, un tipo específico de activismo performativo implementado por la Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) con el fin de presionar a la clase política para cambiar la ley hipotecaria española. A partir del análisis de los círculos gigantes de cartón utilizados por la PAH en los escraches, se estudia cómo estos objetos tienen la capacidad de replantear el espacio y el tiempo de la política. A partir del material etnográfico que se presenta, el artículo indica cómo se elaboran y cómo se usan estos círculos para teorizar sobre la noción de objeto desobediente. De este modo, el trabajo se centra en tres aspectos: cómo los círculos convocan diferentes actores y audiencias, su papel en tanto herramientas políticas que subvierten la narrativa oficial de la crisis financiera, y su rol como elementos clave para cuestionar la moralidad de la deuda hipotecaria y del endeudamiento.

Disobedient objects: material readings of enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England

ABSTRACTResponding to calls for scholars to address ‘material worlds’ in our analyses of protests past, the paper examines the more-than-human historical geographies of enclosure and enclosure protest in sixteenth-century England. It argues that negotiating enclosure – in the sense of both promoting and resisting private property rights – was dependent on particular assemblages of people, animals and things and their convergence within specific spaces and temporalities. Particular attention is paid to mundane and everyday objects entangled in enclosure protest and the ways these assemblages might transform objects’ meanings, rendering them threatening or disobedient. Moreover, repurposing these things offered opportunities to re-make space, concretising or resisting particular claims to access or possession at the local level. It contributed too to the ongoing debate out of which new concepts of property eventually emerged, so that interrogating the materialities of enclosure protest offers vital space in which to rethink the makings of our modern world.

MatteRealities: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies

Abstract “No ideas but in things!” William Carlos Williams’s leitmotif for the modernist epic Paterson seems to anticipate the current renewal of academic attention to the materialities of culture: When the Smithsonian Institution accounts for The History of America in 101 Objects (Kurin) or when Neil MacGregor, designated director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, aims at telling The History of the World in 100 Objects (2011), they use specimens of material culture as register and archive of human activity. Individual exhibitions explore the role of objects in movements for social and political change (Disobedient Objects, Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Large-scale national museum projects like the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin or the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., draw attention to the long existence of collections in Western institutions of learning and reveal the inherently political character of material culture—be that by underscoring the importance of institutional recognition of particular identities or by debates about provenance and restitution of human remains and status objects. The plethora of objects assembled in systematic as well as idiosyncratic collections within and outside the university is just beginning to be systematically explored for their roles in learning and education, funded by national research organizations such as the German BMBF.1 In theatrical performances, things function as discussion prompts in biographical work (Aufstand der Dinge, Schauspielhaus Chemnitz) or unfold their potential to induce a bodily experience (The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, GK Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY). Things are present: as heritage, as commodities, as sensation; they circulate in processes of cognition and mediation, they transcend temporal and spatial distantiations. Things figure in narration and performance, in our everyday life practices, in political activism. They build knowledge of ourselves and others, influence the ways in which we interact with our fellow human beings, and in which we express or control our feelings. They combine the apparently concrete and the fleetingly abstract. Overall, things make us do things.

Disobedient Cultures: Art, Politics, and Resurgent Hope

When political change is remote the only prospect for change is in the realm of imagination. Herbert Marcuse responds to this in his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) after the failure of revolt in Paris in 1968. He argues that although art cannot change the world as such it can change how the world is apprehended. Thus art’s imaginative potential is part of a wider pursuit of freedom. The paper argues that the situation is bleaker today than in the 1970s. Neoliberalism enforces a regime of consumerism even more now than then, and operates globally. Still, hope reappears in direct action from the anti-roads campaigns of the 1990s to anti-capitalism in the 2000s and Occupy in 2011-12 (after a much longer history of direct action). Today’s direct action and campaigning is specific, however, in addressing the trajectory of global capital. It also accepts its own ephemerality—leading Occupy to reject the processes of representation and issue no programme, instead inviting people to be present among others of like mind in the effective creation of a new society within the old. The paper asks to what extent art remains part of this picture of radical alterity, and whether Marcuse’s critical aesthetics remain helpful. Among issues raised are Marcuse’s Enlightenment view of art as autonomous creativity (rather than contingent on production within an art-world); a blurring of the divide between art institutions and the cultures of protest, as in the exhibition Disobedient Objects in London in 2014; and that appropriation may be art’s perpetual burden.

Disobedient Cultures: Art, Politics, and Resurgent Hope

When political change is remote the only prospect for change is in the realm of imagination. Herbert Marcuse responds to this in his last book, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) after the failure of revolt in Paris in 1968. He argues that although art cannot change the world as such it can change how the world is apprehended. Thus art’s imaginative potential is part of a wider pursuit of freedom. The paper argues that the situation is bleaker today than in the 1970s. Neoliberalism enforces a regime of consumerism even more now than then, and operates globally. Still, hope reappears in direct action from the anti-roads campaigns of the 1990s to anti-capitalism in the 2000s and Occupy in 2011-12 (after a much longer history of direct action). Today’s direct action and campaigning is specific, however, in addressing the trajectory of global capital. It also accepts its own ephemerality—leading Occupy to reject the processes of representation and issue no programme, instead inviting people to be present among others of like mind in the effective creation of a new society within the old. The paper asks to what extent art remains part of this picture of radical alterity, and whether Marcuse’s critical aesthetics remain helpful. Among issues raised are Marcuse’s Enlightenment view of art as autonomous creativity (rather than contingent on production within an art-world); a blurring of the divide between art institutions and the cultures of protest, as in the exhibition Disobedient Objects in London in 2014; and that appropriation may be art’s perpetual burden.

Disobedient Objects: Towards a Museum Insurgency

Abstract Assembling a wide range of protest objects produced since the late 1970s, Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014–15) aimed to present the expansive material culture of social movements from a global perspective while charting a ‘people’s history of art and design from below’. This article examines the critical intentions behind the exhibition, compares it to other recent large-scale exhibitions on activist art and situates it within a broader field of museum activism, demonstrating how it displayed not only a collection of disobedient objects but also a model for disobedient curating by directing institutional resources towards ongoing movements and campaigns.

Disobedient Curating: Matt Smith Speaks with Catherine Flood

Disobedient Objects, installation views, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2014 (photographs provided by the Victoria and Albert Museum).Image descriptions: Entrance to Disobedient Objects instal...

A Noble Balancing Act: Museums, Political Activism and Protest Art

Exhibitions of protest art have a unique ability to attract constituents and tourists who might not normally visit a museum. In the age of dwindling budgets and in an attempt to remain relevant, the advantages of collecting and exhibiting protest art are numerous. Do museums benefit from such activities? In the present article, the current environment of museums will first be described, and the moral, ethical and legal obligations of museums to collect protest art will be evaluated. The legal tools, including cultural heritage laws already in place that would encourage museums to preserve protest art are analysed; together with the restrictions of government funding and how curatorial decisions can risk the loss of such funding. Lastly, a series of case studies that demonstrate the challenges and complexities museums face in collecting and displaying protest art is presented. These case studies include: (1) the Victoria and Albert Museum's Disobedient Objects exhibition; (2) the work of preservation groups during Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement; (3) the collecting of protest art by the Missouri History Museum following protests in Ferguson, Missouri; and finally, (4) the Museum of the Moving Image's display of HEWILLNOTDIVIDE. US.

Protest objects: bricolage, performance and counter-archaeology

ABSTRACTIn this article we analyse the Occupy Democracy demonstration that took place in Parliament Square in the autumn of 2014 and the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum 2014–15. We develop a counter-archaeological analysis of these events on the one hand through reflection on previous archaeological studies of protest sites and the new heritage paradigm and on the other through an exploration of bricolage and performance to unpack the complex materialities of these assemblages of people, places and objects.

디자인의 정치: ‘감각 변용’으로서의 디자인

This study contemplates the perspective of Jacques Ranciere to judge the political possibility of design. Ranciere argued the political issue under its close association with aesthetics so that it offers the available route for the art or the design to access. In addition, for Ranciere, politics are presented not in an agreed form but in that of ‘dissensus’ with disparate sentiments, where the controversial situation of disparate languages acts as possibility to overthrow the existing order.Furthermore, it presents several cases of design implying political potential; first, the case that the identical objects suggest cultural difference by topological positioning(Super Normal). Second, the case that turning the given, unique ‘functionality’ of object into ‘usability’ causes difference(Disobedient Objects). All of these cases make design arouse its political possibility by new sentimental division upon it in the scope of everyday life. Following all the discussions above, this study makes an attempt to arouse a discourse on its political possibility. This discussion has a noticeable significance in terms of its trial to estimate new possibility of the existing design.

Disobedient objects: Group Art Therapy for male patients with mild learning disabilities in a locked environment

Disobedient objects: Group Art Therapy for male patients with mild learning disabilities in a locked environment

‘Disobedient Objects’, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 26 July 2014 – 1 February 2015

‘Disobedient Objects’, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 26 July 2014 – 1 February 2015