Agitprop, love trucks and leaflet bombs: the art of protest

Titles can be misleading, and in case you have visions of microwave ovens running amok or washing machines crunching up the parquet, be reassured — or disappointed. Disobedient Objects, the new free display in the V&A’s Porter Gallery, is about objects as tools of social change. It’s a highly politicised exhibition and contains a great deal of fascinating material, from films to how-to guides (not quite ‘how to make a bomb’, but nearly). The gallery was packed when I went along. An admission charge might have made a difference. However, this is the kind of exhibition that should be free in a democratic country — if only to remind as many of us as possible what repressive regimes elsewhere impose on their luckless populations.

The exhibition installation is a very vertical one — appropriate in this tall space — built around closely grouped polished aluminium scaffolding rods stretching from floor to ceiling, inevitably suggesting the bars of a cage or prison. The rods divide the space and provide a structure within which to place exhibits or from which to hang them. Display cases are made from heavily textured fibreboard, and these deliberately rough-and-ready materials give a sense of unpolished immediacy to the proceedings that matches the mood of the content. It’s a small, confined space despite its height, and noisy with music and speeches. There’s a discernible buzz here despite the historical context: the period surveyed ranges from the 1970s to now. The issues are real ones, the grievances seem legitimate and the action taken (by way of the objects on display) still speaks to us today.

Some of the objects have the inventiveness of desperation (a gas mask made from a plastic bottle, for instance), others the greater deliberation of agitprop — such as the three large and expressive papier-mâché puppets made in 1991 by the American Bread and Puppet Theater.