Last Saturday I decided to visit the “You Say You Want A Revolution?”  at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. As you may have noticed from other posts upon this fare page, I value my days-off rather highly. As I’m sure most people do. I also dislike spending large sums of money without due reason and am a lover of the music and culture from the late fifties til present day. It could therefore be assumed that this was the perfect activity for me during one of my prized days off? You may be correct, however not on a Saturday.

We arrived to find queues out of the door of the V and A. This is never a good sign with a Museum, remember, for example, the hideousness of the packed Vatican museum or the slippery floors of the Louvre when we visited as Paris bathed in winter rain.
Museums are meant to inspire quiet contemplative thoughts about history and our place at the tail end of it. Not the desire to push small silly men into the exhibitions and barge your way to freedom. This pop-politik exhibition is no exception.
In fairness to the organizers, allotted ticket times were observed, the procedure for entering the exhibit was swift and well practiced, however within second of entering the exhibit you were very aware of the overcrowding and that it was going to detract massively from the overall experience.
After the first couple of tableaus, the exhibit runs through a couple of bottlenecks. The space is transformed into the trench warfare which sprouted the generation in question as angry, hot, sweaty, sometimes mustachioed tourists trample over your personal space in order to see the exhibit before you do. This life-or-death claustrophobia , heightened by the dancing old women who think that it is acceptable to do so in such a confined space, is a shot in the arm and will make you long for freedom, revolution, basic human rights as the baby-boomers also did. Truly inspiring curation. Or possibly, a silly time to visit.

As you shuffle along the corridors of death and popular culture the longing for air becomes so intense that you may intentionally bump shoulders with people, hoping to flare-up a fight. You may even regret that the security staff didn’t check student id, as without a student card you were akin to a brave one-balled man on the front line who had bribed the doctor.

The  first warren-like exhibits seemed confused neither concentrating on popular culture or history. A large emphasis placed on the fashion of the day rather than the roots of the movement. The distant threads of discontent were pulled together loosely, possibly to grab the attention of the museum-goer before the heavy shit gets dropped. But, when the heavy shit gets dropped, the background information seems insufficient. You are led into a huge room which should be titled “Heavy shit”. All the movements of the day rammed into one space with its own wall – Gay people, female people, black people. Their history and struggle. The next room and the end of the exhibit, the emancipation.
The  room titled “heavy shit” is hugely interesting yet seems to lack the historical foundation. We see a lot of John Lennon suits but they don’t add much. He seems to be a watermark which we can gauge the direction of culture. In the background Gil Scott Heron is mentioned, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Alan Ginsberg.  Other supposed stalwarts or neglected individuals who are deserving of their own exhibits, I’m not so sure.

Rather like this review, the exhibit as a whole lacks clarity. Perhaps as a result of the herd-like numbers present during the day I attended. However that shouldn’t detract from the overall experience. I would go back on a quiet day but it’s too expensive. I did feel that there would have been good continuity had there been more space. One fascinating moment in the exhibit comes when you are surrounded by the fellow museum goers in the first blind mans alley, all jostling to see each exhibit and you pull of the headphones and realise how quiet this large group of people is.

Ultimately, you would learn more about this era with a spare afternoon and Sky Arts or a now out of print Classic rock magazine. Or wikipedia. It does serve to initiate those who aren’t already interested but doesn’t  do a hugely brilliant job. The interactive headphones from Sennhieser work relatively well as you move from wall to wall but don’t get you gripped, the soundtrack is well chosen but again lacks depth.

The last movement is where the killer blow is delivered and to the credit of Revolution, this is where they pull their act together. You are given a taste of how much this radical period achieved, how desperately we need our own revolution, and how devoid our mono-culture is of anything which could deliver change. In 50 years time will the V and A have anything to exhibit about today? Will it fuck. This is reinforced by the massive Sennhieser and Levi’s advert at the end of the exhibit and the exit through the gift shop. You’d think that the organizers would have sense enough to have a corresponding spotify playlist, to re-engage their audience? Nope.

What will happen then? How will we be saved? We won’t. This is the end of days. Instead,  our time will form a five second clip at the end of a cyber time capsule which will be sent into space showing images of our all-encompassing culture, ruined by aspects from the right and left, driven by profit and neo-liberal need for growth, which culturally appropriates, samples and ruins everything to the disgust of everyone bearing the words “Where it all went wrong for us.”

3.5/5 – Probably better on a quieter day.

MrHummels