“All this belongs to You”, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London running in parallel with the UK’s General Election and claims that it “ will examine the role of public institutions in contemporary life and what it means to be responsible for a national collection”. This sounds a really good subject with a series of exhibits scattered around the museum, including several specially-commissioned art installations.
The exhibition is like a Treasure Hunt, but Treasure Hunts need a route and clues and, sadly, finding the exhibits is one of the most frustrating experiences a visitor could wish for, especially as a key route that could connect two of the installations on the 3rd floor is closed off for building works. Perhaps the visitor is not supposed to treat this as an exhibition, but come across the exhibits accidentally. Is that what the curator is trying to tell us about museums and their collections? There is a single-page leaflet, but it is not comprehensive and only serves to emphasize what a logistically challenging place the Victoria and Albert Museum is as the visitor tries to move from one exhibit to another.
The best parts are the special art commissions. The main entrance hall has a huge transparent glass Phenological Clock by Natalie Jeremijenko that represents 12 months in the life-cycle of flowering plants and pollinating insects in the environment around the Museum. The artist has also installed Ag Bags on the walls around the entrance to introduce plant life into the historic stonework and a Moth Cinema will celebrate the role of insects in our ecology.
The two immense plaster columns in the Cast Court have been joined by a third, an inside-out column, a latex mould cast of the inside of Trajan’s column by the New York-based artist Jorge Otero-Pailos set on a mirrored slab that reflects other plaster casts. The installation is covered with the accumulated dust and dirt from the inside of the column, highlighting the importance of, and the need for resources for, cleaning and conservation, while also providing an insight into how the original cast was constructed.
In the Tapestry Gallery, five vitrines by James Bridle entitled “Five Eyes” from the alliance of the main western intelligence powers provides a link between the physical historic collections and their 21st century digital records. Objects have been automatically selected from Museum ‘s 1.4 million digital records and placed on top of the Museum’s paper archive files to create networks of objects that tell stories about the world of intelligence and the five intelligence agencies, each of which has its own vitrine - Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America.
This is the most visually interesting of the installations, being surrounded by tapestries which can be seen through installation and with the horizontal reflections of the files in the reflective side walls suggesting micro-processors or data centres, again providing a subtle link between the historic past and the 21st century digital future of knowledge.
There are also everyday objects scattered around, which would not normally be expected to be found in a major museum and an exhibit in the 20th century galleries on secrecy, security and technology linked to surveillance, communications and the collecting of information, and– with reference to Edward Snowden and to Julian Assange – publishing secret data to the entire world, while the nearby installation by Superflux “Drone Aviary” which explores how this technology developed for surveillance and military applications may now be used in everyday life.
Jonathan Jones in the Guardian sums up the difficulties with this exhibition: “The V&A has done something daring and launched an exhibition about the public sphere to coincide with the general election. Unfortunately, it mirrors the election result currently forecast by opinion polls. All of This Belongs to You is the artistic equivalent of a hung parliament, confused and confusing and without a decisive message.” If the future Prime Minister or Chancellor of the Exchequer spends a quite hour of relaxation here between electioneering, it does not strengthen the case for national museums to be spared any future spending cuts.
An interesting find that relates to the theme, but is not actually part of it, is the gallery which shows the designs, models and work of the artist in residence for the new extension in Exhibition Road. This is far more interesting than the bland exhibition upstairs in the Architecture Gallery and reinforces the relationship between the Museum and its public and the need for funding support for new ways of interacting. It should have been a showpiece of the exhibition, instead of which the visitor stumbles upon it by accident.
