After looking at two residences and one collections - the ILEA collection , Museum of the Home and Sigmund Freud’s personal collection - I was drawn back to the V & A museum have another think about their residence.
It is a place I am familiar with. It was a family treat to marvel in the museums at the objects , wondering about their histories and who had handled them. I often pass the museums complete with leaking roofs on the way to visit my father's office, or on my way to college. Since the National Heritage Act 1983 established the Victoria and Albert Museum, as non-departmental public body to be governed by boards of trustees, it is resplendent, complete with shops cafes and education rooms, departments, and the best loos in london if you like a bit of History.
Shelter on long wet afternoons and perfect for uplifting when you need some magic from another World, the collections are akin to my mothers library shelves or my grandmother's dressing table. The museum is a magical, a tantalising treasure trove stuffed full to the gills.
I haven't rejected the domestic or the seemingly mundane; the V & A contains, doors, bowls, glass, jewels, pictures, silver and windows windows but every object there is loved, its special not just informative and I think that is why I like the place and its collection…. It reminds me of the collections that I am drawn to at home in each of my four pathways of knowledge. The collections are arranged like wunderkammer or Cabinets of curiosities.
The V&A museum along with the other museums in Albertropolis were gathered and built to aid British Manufacturing and the V&A museum, which housed The RCA until the 60s, was specifically created to inform upon design and atheistics. It still holds this ethos central to its mandate with the addition of the caveat to ‘spark everyone’s imagination.’
(Victoria and Albert Museum Annual Report and Accounts 2019-2020)
The link to their Annual report, which outlines everything they want us to see and know about them, includes collaborations with hospitals schools and digital plans for the future.
May be I can find a way to enliven the experience we have with certain object with in this collections by producing something we can touch and take away even if it is a QR code Or a drawing we have done and even shared very like the way in which the ILEA collection worked.
What does the V & A want ?
Experience-
Having worked in a collection, while working at The Chelsea Physics Garden (CPG), I understand the mechanics behind this endeavour -survival, delivery, purpose.
The CPG - A living collection - was where Han Sloane (16 April 1660 – 11 January 1753), The Garden’s primary benefactor, aged 19, studied botany and chemistry at the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, laying the foundations for his future prosperous career as a physician. This man was an avid collector and researcher and his collections of curiosities went on to create the basis for both the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the British Museum (BM)as well as insuring the continuim of the CPG. His political and moral views are fairly abhorrent by todays standards but as a man of his time and his legacy at least is more palatable and should be used in someway used to benefit others, although I do think he a person needs to be placed in context.
He invented hot chocolate as a medical remedy.
THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES -
These collections were to amaze and impress, sometimes horrendous and impossible in their representations - fake news at its best, they were entertainment.
In an age before the digital they drew great crowds and expanded in to rooms to wonder around, and then entire houses where you were charged to view.
Fine art application.
I am immediately reminded of Rauschenberg's paintings and assemblages, also altarpieces and reliquaries - catholic assemblage and paintings - things that contain things - Louise Bourgeois described her drawings ‘as captured thoughts snatched from the air’.
Louise Bourgeois also drew circles to contain things, her worst fears.
This leads me back to Pandoras and her box or vessel, a gift from the gods beautiful, dangerous irresistible. Eve, the vessel of mankind and female icon.
The Madonna, Mary is also described as a vessel.
These are all fairly flat representations of a woman and I think once more of Lilith, her complaint - she wanted equality. I wondered if a collection might explore this idea.
Magic domestic, Virtue, Woman hood, Lore - maybe I should create a tableaux to allow contemplation and a place to ask for intercedance from the virgin mary to allow us to make our own choices in this world without seeming sinful or vulgar, based on fact, and historical references with intuitive placement.
I founds some object and idea based structures with which to explore the idea of magical collections that aim to inspire wonder, to see how this "Liliths complaint" might be presented.
It might be audio like James Burke podcast, where knowledge doesn't go in predictable straight lines. His radio podcast he proves that random connections between people can result in profound and unpredictable consequences.
I read a bit of Willa Cather to see if I might write about it and how she echoes her contemporary Egon Schiele’s exhortation to “envy those who see beauty in everything in the world” and observes:
The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wine glass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.
I shall see what objects and ideas surface, I hope to include the works I have already made and bring all four paths in to one piece.