‘Your generation thinks it’s just bloody immortal… you just want to go on perpetuating your horrible 1960s culture into the next century…’
(teenager Belinda Weber moaning to her environmentally friendly, socialist ex-hippy parents in Bumping Along the Bottom from the Posy Simmonds collection of cartoon strips, Mustn’t Grumble, 1993)
Surround sound
This is the only exhibition I’ve ever been to where the audioguide is compulsory and starts playing while you’re still in the corridor outside the show. Also you don’t have to stop in front of an exhibit and punch in the corresponding number on the device – instead you wander at will through the exhibition and the player senses where you are and automatically plays the relevant soundtrack for wherever you’re standing. Groovy, man!
That soundtrack consists of a non-stop montage of 1960s rock, speeches, TV broadcasts, film clips etc, so that you are hearing tracks by The Beatles, The Beach Boys, speeches by President Kennedy or Martin Luther King (he had a dream, apparently), Neil Armstrong jumping onto the moon or John Lennon at his bed-in at the Montreal Hotel, clips from movies about Swinging London or Antonioni’s classic 1960s film Blow Up, and so on and so on.
Not having to stop and select a track but letting it all wash over you makes for a much more relaxed, surround-sound experience than at most exhibitions – in fact makes it much like walking around with your own headphones on playing a groovy 1960s playlist.
The content
There is absolutely nothing new or unexpected in the show, which amounts to a Greatest Hits of popular culture from the second half of the 1960s. If you had never heard of The Beatles or Beatlemania or their album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, if you didn’t know that The Rolling Stones had a bad boy image and got arrested for drugs, if you didn’t know that Bob Dylan caused a scandal by ditching his folk sound at the 1965 Newport Festival to go electric, if you didn’t know that London was declared ‘Swinging London’ by American magazines or that Twiggy became an emblem of the new waif-look, that mini skirts were popular – if you hadn’t heard of the Oz trial, of Black Power, or know that Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch, that lots of people didn’t like the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon, if you hadn’t heard of hippies or Flower Power or of a big outdoor festival called ‘Woodstock’, then this exhibition will come as a surprise and a revelation to you.
If, on the other hand, you do know all this, have read umpteen books and watched numberless documentaries about the period, as well as having a passing familiarity with the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, The Who, Pink Floyd and so on – then it is a little difficult to figure out what this exhibition is meant to be telling you.
At various points the guide says that the show is trying to trace back to their origins a number of ‘issues’ which are still with us. Well, OK, Women’s Liberation/feminism is still with us, as are problems with race, especially in the USA, whose activists can trace their lineage back to Martin Luther King or the Black Panthers. And environmentalism is still with us, as an ongoing concern for the natural world, which we really do seem to be destroying.
In a more indefinable way ‘deference’ to authority in the form of the police, the courts and politicians was permanently weakened and we are nowadays generally as suspicious of authority figures as most hippies were in 1969.
Again, the way people dress underwent a decisive move away from the formal suits and dresses which had dominated the West for a century or more, towards the casual jeans and T-shirts look which is now pretty much universal.
All of these issues are referenced and described a bit, but not in any great detail.
Art and design
So it’s all sort of interesting, and lots of fun to saunter around ogling the very chair that Christine Keeler sat on for that photoshoot or looking at the very outfit that John Lennon wore on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, along with alternative photos from that photo shoot and hand-written lyrics for The Fool on the Hill or Strawberry Fields Forever.
But a lot of this is just pop trivia. In the big room dominated by vast screens showing clips from the Woodstock festival and playing rock music very loud, there are also cases displaying a Stratocaster guitar which Jimi Hendrix smashed up at a performance at some London club, along with the battered Les Paul guitar played by the rhythm guitarist in his scratch band at Woodstock. There are some notes scribbled by dazed festival goers and pinned to the noticeboard asking for the phone number of the pretty girl they chatted up by the burger stall. All very chilled, man but… in a major exhibition?
The Victoria and Albert Museum on its website says it is the world’s leading museum of art and design. A major aspect of this is fashion and clothes design so I totally accept that the mannekins displaying outfits worn by Twiggy, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, John Lennon and so on fit into its remit.
But a display explaining the historical roots of the Vietnam War along with a random montage of newspaper cuttings about it, including for some reason a letter about his draft papers written by the student Bill Clinton? This is just social history, and very pop, superficial social history at that.
One of the most consistent threads of the show is the hundreds of LP covers pinned to the wall in almost every room, giving a tremendous sense of the outpouring of fantastic rock, pop, jazz, soul and other forms of music from the era. Apparently, they are all from the personal collection of legendary BBC Radio 1 disc jockey John Peel.
What I would have found fascinating and, arguably, more relevant to the V&A’s remit would have been an analysis of the evolution of LP cover art, giving lots of space to pioneering designs and designers, explaining the movements and trends in what came, during this period, a well-defined art form in its own right.
There was some explanation of the way non-commercial posters – as a form of cheap, mass producible communication which weren’t adverts, newspapers or billboards – could be used by all kinds of groups from underground music clubs to radical communist or Black Power groups. In sections like this I felt the V&A was beginning to fulfil its emit but I could have done with a more coherent explanation of the theory and practice, the origin, development and evolution of ‘the poster’ during this turbulent time.
Fun
But this is carping. No cliché is left untapped, no obvious reference point goes unmentioned, no iconic track goes unsampled, in this hugely enjoyable, big warm bath of nostalgia for a period which most of us didn’t actually experience but which all of us, because of the power of its music, films and iconic imagery, feel like we know intimately.
Images
Just as the music is a collection of ‘Sounds of the 60s’, so are the images a familiar collection of great ‘shots of the 60s’, bringing together many of the most iconic, shocking and memorable images of the decade. Thus: Anti-war.
ARLINGTON, Virginia, October 26 1967: Antiwar demonstrators tried flower power on MPs blocking the Pentagon Building in Arlington (Photo by Bernie Boston/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Woodstock.
John Sebastian performs at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in Bethel, New York (Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm) on Friday, August 15, 1969. Image by © Henry Diltz/Corbis
Posters.
Psychedelic poster entitled ‘UFO coming’ by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth), published by Osiris Agency Ltd. London, 1967. Silkscreen
The Christine Keeler photoshoot, May 1963.
Photos of Christine Keeler by Lewis Morley © Lewis Morley National Media Museum Science & Society Picture Library
Installations
Swinging London (note the phone box and bus stop at the back). The cat suit on the right was designed specially for Mick Jagger.
Swinging London installation. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band display case.
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band display case. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Woodstock room with massive multiscreens dwarfing Keith Moon’s drum kits and a selection of costumes worn by performers on the raised platform. Note the display case at bottom left which contains the hand-written notes and messages by festival attendees.
The Woodstock room. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Related links
- You Say You Want A Revolution continues at the V&A until 26 February 2017
Books & Boots 