Cold War Modern - What A Mess

I met Rodney Bailey today on my day off and visited both the V&A's Cold War Modern: Design 1945 - 1970 and also Rodney's own What a Mess exhibition at First Out Cafe.

Cold War Modern argued that design from 1945 - 1970 was greatly influenced by the cold war between the two great secular belief systems of the twentieth century, capitalism and communism. This was seen both in the materials used which often derived originally from developments in military technology and in the sense of competing forces which drove both cultures and the artists and designers at work within those cultures. Words that recurred throughout the exhibition were: anxiety, tension, competition, crisis, fear. A time of what was often perceived and received as progress and prosperity was built on a climate of fear and suspicion. What I noticed most was the almost complete absence on any spirituality among the exhibits and the resultant coldness in much of what was displayed; design that was more the result of ideologies than humanity.

What a Mess by contrast had plenty of humanity. This exhibition featured Rodney's grafitti paintings which use graphic lines and messy but vibrant colour contrasts to raise issues of identity. These pieces are often map-based either in terms of looking down onto a streetscape from above or where a map forms the outline of a body so that places on the map indicate significant experiences composing a person. My favourite pieces were a cooler abstract in orange/yellow with a heavy black shape outlined over the colour and two semi-abstract faces in similar style and colouring emerging from the darkness of the outlines. These are paintings containing a mess of colourful experiences which often burst from the frame or map or outline that seeks to contain them.

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Sufjan Stevens - Romulus.