fri 29/03/2024

The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Artangel at Blythe House | reviews, news & interviews

The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Artangel at Blythe House

The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Artangel at Blythe House

Wordplay and cryptic interventions at the V&A's vast treasure house

Judith Clark is a fashion curator, Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and writer. In collaboration with Artangel, that font of innovative artistic commissions (including Rachel Whiteread’s House, Michael Landy’s Break Down), they have produced what is perhaps best described as an intervention, rather than an art installation, in Blythe House, the Hammersmith outpost of the V&A.

This fortress-like Victorian monolith was once the Post Office Savings Bank’s administrative offices: intangible "savings" were processed here. Now it holds more tangible assets: the reserve collections of the V&A, the Science Museum and the British Museum, and the public is normally only able to enter the building to use the Theatre Museum’s reading room, a small, drab, 1950s space.

The building’s entrance is an unidentified turnstile; an industrial-sized lift and then a vertiginous spiral staircase to carry visitors to the first stop, and bam – we are on the roof of Blythe House, with the most amazing view of London: to Wembley, to St Paul’s and beyond, south, west – it is hard to think about art when this breathtaking vista is unexpectedly revealed. Yet revealing, and concealing, is the subject of The Concise Dictionary of Dress. How do we, and how do museums, tread the fine line between what we show and what we conceal; in fashion, what we display (its function?) and what we conserve (the only way in which it can acquire a history)? Museums hoard fragile items, they hate to display them, because they are irretrievably damaged by light, by uncontrolled humidity, by temperature; yet at the same time they know that display is their purpose. This dichotomy is at the heart of The Dictionary.

Eleven displays have been secreted around Blythe House, and the visitor threads through the storage areas, to each display with its cryptic "definition". On the roof is Armoured, a resin figure in what is probably 18th-century dress (we only see it from the back), staring out over the city. Phillips’s definition of the piece includes "keeping a dark or secret profile...hardened for the elements...inviting attack and being prepared for it". The resin shimmers in the light, seeming intangible, yet at the same time asserting a strong presence.

Conformist3photobyJulianAbramsConformist (pictured right; photo Julian Abrams) then follows, in one of the rolling storage racks downstairs, where a William Morris wallpaper has been recreated on a toile, a fabric pattern for a dress, once more non-specific in period. Here the definition is (in part) "A state of essential simplification...recipient of an unnoticed demand, complicit; choosing not to choose..." and a range of more mutually contradictory tags. For those who enjoy wordplay, there is a certain pleasure to be found here. The expanded text, in an accompanying book, gives additional prompts, however, and is useful.

The real problem is that these interventions are both too small and too large. Too small, in the vastness of the V&A’s treasure house; too large in that we cannot roam the building at will and stumble across the pieces as part of the fabric of the collection. Instead we are shepherded from point to point, and each ceremonious unveiling is disproportionate to the piece. For the thrilling nature of the hidden revealed – constantly suggested throughout the tour of Blythe House, as rack after rack of items are glimpsed, tantalising labels read ("Bed Parts/ Miscellaneous Shells/ Gilt/ Lacquer/ Japanning") – diminishes The Dictionary. What is being passed raises so many issues: are museums what we see, or what we don’t see? What is the purpose of collecting, and of collections? How do we display the undisplayable? Although these are questions The Dictionary seeks to address, it is in the interstices, the junctions, that the answers come, less than with the exhibits themselves, which are dwarfed by the massive nature of the collection and its home.

The sheer size of this hoard makes the tiny interventions by Clark and Phillips seem fey, precious. Samuel Beckett once said, "No symbol where none intended", meant as a rebuke to those who read more into his work than he wrote. If you think words, and objects, are endlessly malleable, they end up merely mute.

DictionaryPlain1photobyJulianAbramsThe most successful intervention is, perhaps not coincidentally, also the simplest: it is Plain (pictured left; photo Julian Abrams), set in the extraordinary textiles store, a hangar-sized room with hundreds of rows of fabrics wrapped in Tyvek, the material used by conservators to preserve textile goods. Here Clark has wrapped seven dresses in the same material, and set them out as though ready for exhibition. The white-tiled room, with its thousands of white fabric rolls, surrounds these seven white ghosts, showing in model form how space inhabits exhibitions, and is excluded from storage: display equals space, while conservation is a negation of space.

Had the installation all been of this level, The Concise Dictionary of Dress would have been a remarkable piece. As it is, the building is well worth the visit, with the exhibition more of an add-on.

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