On a hot day in 2007, at the height of the Texan summer, Carrie Reichardt and Nick Reynolds found themselves in a cabin in the woods. They were rushing to create a death mask from the body of Carrie's just-executed friend, before putrefaction or the authorities caught up with them.
The body was that of John Joe “Ash” Amador, who had received the death sentence for killing a cab driver 13 years earlier. Reichardt, who describes herself on her website as a “renegade potter and extreme craftivist,” had been writing to him while he was inside. For this last act of friendship, she enlisted the help of Nick Reynolds (son of the great train robber Bruce) whose other masks include one of his father and another of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm Mclaren. While Amador's wife and family, who accompanied them, were legally allowed to transport the dead man's body, this detour wasn't covered by their permit. It was done swiftly, without leaving any trace on the corpse. When Amador's wife washed the clay off his face after the cast had set, it was the first time she'd been allowed to touch him since he was sentenced just under 12 years previously.
Seven years later, the death mask sits atop a large pickup truck in the Victoria & Albert Museum, its hull alive with mustard yellow and orange ceramic tiles. This is the “Tiki Love Truck,” a protest vehicle which Reichardt has taken to parades in Blackpool and Newcastle, festivals including Glastonbury, and other gatherings in order to spread the word about the injustice of the death penalty. The ceramics, she explains, are what people notice first. Onlookers laugh, ask to touch the tiles, ask her about the effect of the weight on the truck's suspension. Only after some time do they notice the chocolate brown mask which rests, silent and a little haughty, above the windscreen. It is, says Reichardt, an effective strategy for political campaigning; establish a rapport with people, get them interested, then bring out the harder, scarier stuff.
This is just one of many strategies for protest on display at the V&A's “Disobedient Objects,” an exhibition of art and design works created as tools of social change. Items on display range from simple tools—tear gas masks made out of water bottles, a saucepan lid banged in conjunction with hundreds of others to form an Argentinian “noise protest,”—to more complex works, such as a mobile phone game which asks the user to participate in a series of atrocities. Arranged around a high-ceilinged room in four sections (“Making worlds,” “Solidarity,” “Direct action,” and “A multitude of struggles,”), together these objects illustrate the ingenuity of radical movements and oppressed peoples around the world.
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What is most striking here is the continued importance of the physical, rather than the digital, world to the expression of dissent. The curators, who have focused on objects from the late 1970s to the present day, have been careful not to ignore the role of the internet, but recent work is perhaps most interesting when it addresses the interplay between the “real” and online realms. One of the curators, Gavin Grindon, points me toward a lurid purple placard used in a 2011 protest against UK tuition fees rises, on which is scrawled the legend “I wish my boyfriend was as dirty as your policies.” Until the early 2000s, he says, the prevailing trend was for protestors to use placards with identical slogans. Since at least 2009, protests around the world have been enlivened by imaginative and individual homemade placards, which their makers hold aloft in the hopes of their being uploaded to plenty of instagrams and going viral.
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Connections abound between these objects, and not just because of their shared purpose. Carrie Reichardt leads me away from her Tiki Love Truck to another part of the exhibition, showing me a steel pendant reading “fuck the law.” The pendant was cast in Chrome-plated steel on the instructions of Herman Wallace, a Black Panther whose (eventually overturned) conviction for murder was long a cause celebre of the American left.He sent it to Reichardt's daughter, after she visited him in prison. Surprising encounters happen all the time in the life of an activist. Noel Cash, whose “Occupy Liz” stamp for defacing British banknotes features in the exhibition, tells me that when he was forced to admit what type of work he did to a UK customs official while flying from the US to attend the exhibition, the man was full of nothing but praise for Cash's creativity.
Perhaps it is this emphasis on solidarity which makes the curators noticeably reluctant to criticise any of the movements and methods they have chosen. This is largely reflected in their avoidance of some trickier groups. Floodnet, a 1990s computer program which was used to launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on Mexican government servers, is here, displayed on a built-in screen near the end of the exhibition. Yet the most prolific present-day users of DoS tactics, the activist group Anonymous, are nowhere to be found. Their morally ambivalent public image (while many support their attacks on a wide variety of targets from banks to alleged rapists, others have accused them of being overzealous vigilantes) would have made them much more challenging to engage with than the Mexican leftist creators of Floodnet, who are far removed from a British audience.
Still, the exhibition comes at an exciting moment for activists. One work, John Bieler's spellbinding data visualisation Every Protest in the World Since 1979, forces us to cast our thoughts forward to where these disobedient objects might go when they leave the V&A. A world map forms the backdrop for flashing points of light, representing sites of protest in a given year. It begins with a few sparse flickers in 1979. It ends with a galaxy of flashpoints across every continent in 2013. A visit to this exhibition is itself an encounter with artefacts of activism that will, in many cases, return to active service around the world once their short time together in the V&A is over. “It's often said that social change happens through small acts of resistance that start to multiply and add up,” says co-curator Catherine Flood. Similarly, these disobedient objects, individually humble, together form a compelling testament to the creativity that can arise from repression.
Disobedient Objects is free and runs at the V&A until 1st February 2015
