This morning I am participating in the V&A’s study day From Biba To Topshop with a presentation on the rise and fall of boutique culture in London’s King’s Road, starting with the opening of Bazaar by Archie Nairn, Alexander Plunket-Green and Mary Quant at 138a in 1955 and closing with the establishment of World’s End at 430 by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.
More details here.
Tomorrow I’m participating in the V&A study day on British design in the 60s with a talk about the development of graphics and poster art during the decade.
I’m speaking at 2.30pm – more details here.
“People do love huge pieces of paper”.
So runs the quote heading up a section in V&A curator Catherine Flood’s excellent overview British Posters: Advertising Art & Activism, published by the museum to coincide with its multifarious design celebrations this Olympic year.
And it’s true. We do.
Or we all did, when this vital form was simultaneously a mass-medium and a highly personal communications device, when huge promotional budgets and lack of urban controls resulted in the accretive papering of our street-scapes. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, we gave posters pride of place on the walls of our bedrooms, bedsits and sitting rooms.
Continue reading British Posters: Advertising Art & Activism
I sourced this incredible large-scale Barney Bubbles-designed poster from a private collection for the V&A’s forthcoming exhibition British Design: 1948-2012.
Chris Breward, co-curator with Ghislaine Wood, credits my 2010 exhibition Process (which focused on Bubbles’ working practices) for having persuaded the V&A to foreground the work of the late graphic designer in the new show.
Continue reading Ian Dury With Love: Barney Bubbles back at the V&A
Here is a selection of images from the V&A’s forthcoming exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990. In pursuit of this slippery-to-define movement, curators Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt have settled on the defining principles of quotation and bricolage (assemblage from diverse elements).
As a result they have mixed and matched disciplines, categories and scale in their line-up of 250 exhibits, ranging from a reconstruction of Hans Hollein’s 1980 Venice Biennale facade The Presence Of The Past to graphics for record sleeves by Barney Bubbles, Neville Brody and Peter Saville.
Continue reading Preview of an exhibition: Postmodernism at the V&A
