Really, the very best kind of Christmas present is when one of one's cousins sends one images of one's past self, or selves - aged, here, between 10 and 14, I'd say (the bottom one is me, aged 10, with Joker (a surly pony, if ever I met one) and Newboy; top right, with Kim and top left, with Fenn - one of my all-time favorites, and Hector. That all seems a very long time ago as did the 1960s exhibition at the V&A that we went to today: strangely curated, since there was no real narrative, other than chronology, and very, very little by way of cause and effect. I can't imagine what anyone who hadn't lived through the 60s would have made of it. Then there was the other peculiar sense that half ot it could have been curated out of things stored in our garage - old album covers; ephemera like propaganda at the time of the SchoolKids Oz trial; Aubrey Beardsley posters. It brought home, if nothing else, the materiality of the 60s: whether the tangibility of badly-made clothes, of shop iconography; of news clippings; of concert publicity, or of consumerism and purchasing power. Of course, if would have been great if it had connected the two, but it didn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment