Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.glennadamson.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Lives in Brooklyn
LOC:
| LC control no.: | n 00008636 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n00008636 |
| HEADING: | Adamson, Glenn |
| 000 | 01233cz a2200217n 450 |
| 001 | 5238530 |
| 005 | 20180725093035.0 |
| 008 | 001114n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 00008636 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca05356959 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |d UPB |d DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1972-08-10 |2 edtf |
| 100 | 1_ |a Adamson, Glenn |
| 373 | __ |a Museum of Arts and Design (New York, N.Y.) |2 naf |
| 374 | __ |a Art museum directors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a An inaugural gift, 2000: |b t.p. (Glenn Adamson) |
| 670 | __ |a Contemporary studio case furniture, 2001: |b (Glenn Adamson) data sheet (08-10-72) |
| 670 | __ |a Wendell Castle, 2014: |b title page (essays by Glenn Adamson) jacket (Glenn Adamson is the director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York) |
| 670 | __ |a Author’s web site, viewed July 25, 2018 |b (Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in Brooklyn, who works across the fields of design, craft and contemporary art. Currently Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and Editor-at-Large of The Magazine Antiques, he has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee) |
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 10, 1972, in Boston, MA.
EDUCATION:Cornell University, B.A., 1994; Yale University, Ph.D., 2001.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Chipstone Foundation, Milwaukee, WI, curator and adjunct curator at Milwaukee Art Museum, 2000-05; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, began as deputy head, became head of research, exhibition curator, and leader of graduate program in design history in collaboration with Royal College of Art, beginning 2005; Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, Nanette L. Laitman Director and exhibition curator, 2013-16; art historian and writer, Brooklyn, NY. University of Wisconsin–Madison, teacher of art history; Yale University, senior scholar at Yale Center for British Art. Design Museum, London, guest curator for Beazley Designs of the Year 10, 2017; Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, England, chair of board of trustees.
AWARDS:Iris Foundation Award, outstanding contributions to the decorative arts, Bard Graduate Center, Bard College, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous other books and exhibition catalogs, including Contemporary Studio Case Furniture: The Inside Story, Elvehjam Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, 2002; California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, edited by Wendy Kaplan, MIT Press, 2011; Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design, Harry N. Abrams, 2011; Tom Loeser: It Could Have Been Kindling, Museum of Wisconsin Art (West Bend, WI), 2014; and Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), 2018. Coeditor, Journal of Modern Craft, beginning 2008; editor at large, Antiques.
SIDELIGHTS
Glenn Adamson is a product of the American heartland, widely celebrated as the home of American ingenuity, hard work, and simple values. Although he was born in Boston, his grandfather was a native of Kansas who emerged from the Depression well-trained in the ability to fend for himself and create what he needed in life. Adamson’s own career began in Wisconsin, when he worked for the Chipstone Foundation, a center for the preservation and promotion of the decorative arts. In partnership with the Milwaukee Art Museum, Adamson devoted five years to exhibitions and outreach programs on the ingenuity behind American material culture: furniture, ceramics, and more.
Industrial Strength Design and Thinking through Craft
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World is Adamson’s story of a man whose designs reached virtually every corner of the midcentury material world. In the economic optimism of postwar America, Stevens’s creations revolutionized the structural design of clothes dryers, motorcycles, beer bottles, outboard boat motors, and hundreds of other everyday products. He combined art with science to surround his practical designs with a seductive aesthetic element and imbue them with an innovation that came to be known as “planned obsolescence.” A Publishers Weekly commentator found Adamson’s profusely illustrated volume to be “uncommonly … well designed and visually compelling.”
Adamson pondered the theory, design, and execution of craft from several other perspectives. He revealed in Elin Alvemark’s interview at the Swedish Academy of Design and Craft website that he wrote Thinking through Craft to address what he perceived at the time as “a lack of sophisticated literature in the field of craft.” He argues that craft, so often relegated to marginal status at the edge of the legitimate art world, warrants serious study as a subject in its own right. He described the tone of his book as “satirical,” and Alvemark considered it “funny,” but future work would leave little doubt about his serious and scholarly approach to the history and future of craft.
The Craft Reader, The Invention of Craft, and Art in the Making
The Craft Reader is a collection of essays in which, according to B.L. Herman’s review in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, the author approaches “craft as a constellation of ideas and practices in the service of an art and aesthetics of the everyday.” The content ranges from past to present, from handmade furniture to handcrafted candies. Essayists range from political theorist Karl Marx to nineteenth-century designer William Morris to twentieth-century critic Lucy Lippard.
In The Invention of Craft Adamson offers the unexpected thesis that the industrial revolution did not sound the death knell for traditional crafts, but actually ushered in a new period of modern craft. He portrays modern craft as a reaction to the changes wrought by industrialization, a vigorous response that rose from the ashes of a vanishing past. To K.L. Ames, writing in Choice, The Invention of Craft represents “an impressive, authoritative revisionist historical analysis.”
Art in the Making is a copiously illustrated survey of the production of modern art. Adamson and coauthor Julia Bryan-Wilson address the collaboration of assistants, collectives, and manufacturing facilities in the creation of current artwork and crafts. They also discuss the multiple media, materials, and equipment required for this shared method of production. The authors emphasize the need to acknowledge the many contributors who enable the artists of today to present their creative vision to the museum and the marketplace.
Fewer, Better Things
Adamson never abandoned his devotion to craft and the art of the everyday world, but in 2005 he moved to London as a researcher and curator at the renowned Victoria and Albert Museum. For several years he collaborated with Jane Pavitt to mount a massive exhibition on postmodernism, which finally opened in 2011. The exhibition was not well received by London critics, who found it to be an overblown example of the amorphous postmodern movement itself. Andrew Graham-Dixon described the show in the Telegraph Online as “a bewildering journey through all kinds of unpredictable hinterlands of taste.” The exhibition catalog, however, generated a more favorable response. The collection of essays from more than forty contributors covers a movement that sprawled across a vast range of artistic endeavors–a movement often seen as more conceptual than concrete. Choice contributor D.E. Gliem recommended the volume as “an absolutely engaging read.”
In 2013 Adamson returned to the United States to direct the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. For three years he refocused his attention on the history and celebration of the crafts that have enriched everyday American life for generations. Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects offers a nostalgic look back at his grandfather’s generation. Adamson argues that designers like Brooks Stevens elevated the craft of invention to uncharted heights that would have an unintended impact on both the environment and the potential creativity of future generations.
“In the past, we held onto things to pass down as heirlooms,” Adamson told Gary Drevitch in a Psychology Today interview. Now, products have taken on the aura of junk food, he explained: cheap, consumable, disposable. He added: “It’s important to remind ourselves of what technology may be making invisible or encouraging us to forget.” The author points to the declining number of people who still know how to make things–how to unlock the imagination and curiosity that fuels the creative process. Adamson calls for people to foster “a positive relationship to … one thing instead of banal relationships with hundreds of things.” According to Drevitch, Adamson believes this practice “will lead us to lives of greater warmth and satisfaction, and, on a societal scale, promote respect and social cohesion.” To a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “although a bit dry in spots, Adamson’s crafty enthusiasm is infectious.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Adamson, Glenn, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects, Bloomsbury Publishing (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
American Scientist, March-April, 2004, Craig M. Vogel, review of Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World, p. 192.
Choice, December, 2010, B.L. Herman, review of The Craft Reader, p. 668; August, 2012, D.E. Gliem, review of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, p. 2265; October, 2013, K.L. Ames, review of The Invention of Craft, p. 243; November, 2016, Anna Calluori Holcombe, review of Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing, 366.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2018, review of Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects.
Library Journal, October 15, 2013, Jennifer Naimzadeh, review of The Invention of Craft, p. 94.
New Scientist, September 6, 2003, Adam Goff, review of Industrial Strength Design, p. 48.
Psychology Today, July-August, 2018, Gary Drevitch, “He Knows What You Really Need” (author interview), p. 26.
Publishers Weekly, August 18, 2003, review of Industrial Strength Design, p. 74; April 9, 2018, review of Fewer, Better Things, p. 64.
ONLINE
Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg website, https://hdk.gu.se/ (June 26, 2018), Elin Alvemark, author interview.
Architectural Digest Online, https://www.architecturaldigest.com/ (August 13, 2018), Sarah Archer, review of Fewer, Better Things.
Art Practical, https://wwww.artpractical.com/ (May 30, 2011), Bean Gilsdorf, author interview.
Glenn Adamson website, https://www.glennadamson.com (August 17, 2018).
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 28, 2011), Mark Brown, review of Postmodernism.
Museum of Art and Design website, https://madmuseum.org/ (September 4, 2013), author profile.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (September 4, 2013), Robin Pogrebin, “A Critic of a Design Museum Will Lead It.”
Telegraph Online, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (September 30, 2011), Andrew Graham-Dixon, review of Postmodernism.
Bio
Glenn-2.jpg
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in Brooklyn, who works across the fields of design, craft and contemporary art.
Currently Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and Editor-at-Large of The Magazine Antiques, he has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee.
His publications include Art in the Making (2016, co-authored with Julia Bryan Wilson); Invention of Craft (2013); Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011); The Craft Reader (2010); and Thinking Through Craft (2007).
Glenn is serving as the guest curator for Beazley Designs of the Year 10 at the Design Museum, London, which will open in October 2017.
Glenn Adamson in conversation with HDK student Elin Alvemark
NEWS: JUN 26, 2018
Glenn Adamson is a central figure in Art Theory focusing on craft and design and the writer behind Thinking Through Craft, The Invention of Craft and Art In the Making. Today, he is a senior scholar at Yale University but previously he has also been head of research at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. HDK student Elin Alvemark met Glenn Adamson in Gothenburg and asked questions about work and motivation.
You are a critic. How do you relate to being reviewed? Do you read reviews of your books?
– Yes I do, but when Thinking Through Craft came out just a few reviews were published. A more interesting thing happened when the book was embraced by art students. I had originally written Thinking Through Craft as an answer to postwar art history but as far as I can see, the postwar art history has not taken any notice whatsoever. It has completely passed that reading circle. Though you may have found some reviews I haven’t found!?!
Glenn Adamson laughs loudly and continues.
– I feel extremely fortunate that this audience revealed itself. I had no idea it existed when I wrote the book. Without the art students, the book had fallen into oblivion and no one had bothered to care about these topics. When The Invention of Craft came out, it got reviews that were more thorough and more useful to me. Since I had a little bit of a track record by that time, more interesting writers picked it up and at least this time I could tell they had actually read the book!
– The other thing I would like to share is how much Thinking Through Craft is a continuation of my dissertation. My dissertation was at the time incomplete and my external supervisor Caroline Jones, now a professor at MIT, had a lot of negative things to say about it, which I took to heart and used when I re-worked it. This is a part in how I structured my thesis and later how I came to work with the thoughts in Thinking Through Craft.
I think one of Thinking Through Craft’s great merits is that it is <
– I think you are making an interesting observation regarding the<< satirical>> tone of the book, which I do not think I use anymore. Thinking Through Craft is very much "a young man's book". I perceived a lack of intellectual seriosity in the field overall. I felt specifically a lack of sophisticated literature in the field of craft. I reserve myself the right to define Thinking Through Craft as a sophisticated book (laughing). I can honestly say it's not true anymore. Today, there are so many who write very well formulated in the field of arts and crafts theory and crafts history. Today my frustration had not been adequate.
How do we handle what humanity at a time when digital life increasingly takes us over? Can the handmade give us human worth? How? That's what I'm writing about now.
In what way do you think public recognition changes a person's work? Has it changed for you?
- I've thought about it and it has motivated me to write the book that is going to be published in August called Fewer Better Things. It specifically targets a wider reading circuit. It was funny because I aimed to write so that my own mother would understand, but the editor came back with feedback and thought I should suppress the academic tone. When the magazine reviewed the first edition, they wrote "good, but somewhat academic!".
What’s your take on that?
– How difficult it is to find the balance. You do not want to sound condescending and "talking down". At the same time you want to avoid unnecessary academia and thus alienate.
– However, I think politics today is not about right wing and left wing but more about just this. That is, people who have a tolerance for complexity versus people who lack a tolerance for complexity. So the reason, as I see it, that someone would vote for Donald Trump, is that they cannot handle the global complexity that is today's situation. We have access to endless amounts of information. In that situation there is the tendency to turn off and shut down, which I think is human. I understand that. One says, "I do not want to know. Keep it simple! ". This is the social context and situation I'm writing in today. That has changed from when I started and wasn’t very recognized. It is beyond questions like; should I value the item because it's handmade or skillfully made. The core issue is about a broader theme: How do we handle what humanity at a time when digital life increasingly takes us over? Can the handmade give us human worth? How? That's what I'm writing about now.
BY: ELIN ALVEMARK
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2.18 / American Road Signs
Interview with Glenn Adamson
By Bean Gilsdorf
May 30, 2011
Image: Glenn Adamson. Photo: Sipke Visser.
My interest in Glenn Adamson’s work began in 2006 with his essay “Handy-Crafts: A Doctrine,” which is included in the anthology What Makes a Great Exhibition? In this essay, Adamson posed a question that was to become an encapsulation of his practice as a historian and curator: “When the climate is so militantly hostile to an intelligent handling of craft, how is a curator who is interested in craft to navigate the shoals?” His answer is disarmingly simple: “treat craft as a subject, not a category.”1
Over the past decade, Adamson has been one of the few to investigate and re-envision craft from this wholly new position. He followed “Handy-Crafts” with the 2007 Thinking Through Craft, which argues that the supplementary status of craft is its very strength and that its position in the margin of art allows it space from which to provide a critique. Recognizing the absence of any standard for basic craft education, Adamson edited The Craft Reader in 2010, providing a foundational-level education in materiality, objecthood, and labor through the inclusion of essays by Karl Marx, William Morris, Annie Albers, and Lucy Lippard. I sat down with Adamson on April 1, 2011, just before he gave the keynote speech at the “Craft Forward” symposium hosted by the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
________
Bean Gilsdorf: You’re putting together a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London on postmodernism, and I wonder if you could start by defining that term, because it’s so contentious.2
Glenn Adamson: The definition that we’ve been using—or the application of the term that we’ve been using—is that postmodernism is the proliferation of responses to the collapse of the modernist project. Rather than defining it positively, we’ve defined it as a phase of thinking and practice that occurs because the sometimes utopian or progressive practices and certainty of modernism—best known in architecture, but known in the other arts as well—collapses and you have something in its wake. That’s postmodernism. It’s very much a relational term, and it’s essentially based on the idea of freedom and difference. Modernism is like a transparent window, and it pretends to show you the world clearly, and postmodernism is like a shattered mirror, so it reflects yourself at yourself, but in fragments. It doesn’t necessarily pretend to truly show you anything; it’s simply a reflection of your own situation. That’s the long version; the short version is that postmodernism is what happens after modernism dies. What’s interesting, of course, is that modernism was revived in the 1990s. To some extent, it didn’t ever go away, because you always had modernist holdouts, but modernism again became the dominant style, and then you arguably have a kind of hybridization of various modernist and postmodernist motifs and approaches. But in any case, we’re thinking about postmodernism in the ’70s and ’80s, in that reactive, destructive way.
Jean Paul Goude. Maternity dress for Grace Jones, 1979.
BG: In your previous craft projects and in your interest in craft, I am interested in your application of the term friction—where you identify a sense of working against something. Is that how you came to the idea of doing this project on postmodernism?
GA: The museum leadership pitched the idea to my cocurator Jane Pavitt and me, but it immediately appealed for exactly the reason you’re saying. I help edit The Journal of Modern Craft, which places modernism and craft in opposition. I’ve always thought of craft as something that is both produced by modernity and contests it. Postmodernism is the same thing, except with a very different structure.
BG: Do you tend to think in poles of opposition?
GA: Dialectically. It’s always about exposing a false opposition, or seeing how an opposition works, sometimes to create a synthesis and sometimes, possibly, to create further fragmentation as well. Marx thought that a real dialectic was one that was resolved. So he would say that if there was no possibility of resolution, you weren’t looking at a dialectic. But I think of opposition in postmodern terms, as leading to further fragmentation, or a rhizomatic, infinite cascade.
BG: Is that why you think that craft now is so productive?
GA: Yes, craft is not in an oppositional relationship to anything anymore. It’s in a supplementary relationship or a supporting relationship, but it’s not opposed to industry or mass production; it isn’t opposed to modernization. In fact, it could be the vehicle by which all those things occur. For example, the Chinese economy is essentially founded on artisanal skills, yet it’s challenging the West and unsettling the hegemony of capitalism as we know it through craft. A kind of hyper-capitalization occurs through the organization of work, by integrating craft in factories and large-scale serial production. It can be integrated with various digital practices; it can be organized through various art and design practices in an oppositional way. So craft can’t retain that simple William Morris–style, anti-alienation, humanizing message. Some of that is quite important to hold on to, but it doesn’t need to be didactic in its opposition.
BG: Are you interested in the continuing use of craft as a form of protest?
GA: Definitely. It is key that it retains that bite or that critique, that critical edge, but in the context of fluidity and possibility-making and facilitation. For example, craft can be simultaneously critical and self-effacing by being plunged into a certain social context.
BG: But it sounds like craft still has to be “apart from” in order to make that critique.
GA: It needs to create some space for itself, and it is indeed a temporal, spatial thing. That’s one of the ways that craft applies friction: it requires space, time, skill, infrastructure, and tools. It’s not conceptual art, therefore its critical apparatus is fundamentally different; it’s complicit, embedded, materialized.
BG: Do you see craft operating in the same way in twenty years?
GA: I always find those questions really difficult because I’m a historian!
BG: You look backward.
GA: My business is right up until yesterday and then I absent myself from the discussion. Although the next show I’m working on at the V&A is about the future. It’s about the history of prophetic design. Not necessarily impossible design, but improbable design—design that probably won’t be realized in the present day, but forecasts [the future]. So I’ve been thinking about a kind of history of futurology. So with those spectacles on, I might say that craft won’t stay fashionable the way that it is now. I think it will recede again into a kind of unstated, taken-for-granted-ness.
BG: Go into a period of lull.
GA: I think it will not regain the sort of embarrassing separateness that it had in the ’80s and ’90s. But I think and hope it will become an evermore explicit area of political discourse. I want craft to be not so tacit or unspoken, not so hidden offstage. I want it to be something that everyone sees happening before their eyes and thinks constantly about how it should be structured. Rather like environmentalism, the politics of global outsourcing and labor are going to force that issue, partly because the people that are being exploited now are going to take it up. If you imagine what’s happening with the Arab Spring now—if you apply that sense of uprising to global labor politics—you can see craft playing a key role there, especially in the way that gender performs as this repressed element that’s not going to take it anymore. That’s what I would like to see, but maybe that’s too optimistic.
BG: You use your blog From Sketch to Product as a platform to talk about design. How does design fit in with craft?
GA: The blog prompted the future of design idea. Briefly, it locates the presence of craft within design by looking at prototyping and sketching. The idea is to look at a preparatory stage as a way of isolating the location of skill and the hand and various kinds of tooling. One of the earliest examples was a look at the difference between an airbrush and a felt-tip marker, and how the use of different sketching materials produces a different car. It’s really a way of isolating the craft activity that stands in relation to the rest of the design process—that is part of the design process, rather than separated out as some kind of studio craft thing. You don’t see the sketch and the prototype made of tape and cardboard, or carved wood, or whatever it was when you look at the final object, but you might feel its resonance. That would not have been possible without the craft object that came before it.
Martine Bedin. Super Lamp, 1981. Photo: Christie's Images, Ltd.
BG: In the blog you talk about the use of different fonts. Where does that come in?
GA: That came from working with the graphic designer on the Postmodernism exhibition. I was struck by her ability to envision many, many different applications of a set of graphic ideas and typefaces and the artisanal quality of that, because she was so attentive to the materiality and nuance of each letterform. You expect that of a graphic designer, but it was so interesting to see her go through the font selection process and alight on one of them for reasons she might not have been able to explain.
BG: So it was intuitive.
GA: Yes, much in the way that somebody throwing a pot would find the process intuitive. I was struck by all those correspondences, even though [graphic design] is less obviously craftlike—she wasn’t hand lettering.
BG: But it’s still a foundational platform of knowledge and skills that leads to working through intuition, a knowledge base that doesn’t necessarily have to be tapped explicitly.
GA: And the blog’s not just about craft–design relations, but about the way that creativity works. Sketching is a nice thing to look at if you want to understand that.
BG: Back to postmodernism—why are postmodernism and craft so contentious, such disputed territories?
GA: They’re very different cases. In the case of postmodernism, it was a matter of the fundamental vacancy of the term. Even now, thirty years later, we’re defining it negatively, and that’s telling. Because postmodernism’s not one set of ideas that makes a lot of things possible, it’s a way of thinking that shatters the concept of stylistic unity. You don’t believe in “isms” anymore, except in a kind of joking way—you wouldn’t have Cubism or futurism after postmodernism. Also, because the discussion about postmodernism carried on for such a long time without it producing anything that seemed definitive, and because it became complicit with commodity culture in the ’80s, people became exhausted with it. What seemed initially to be very liberatory became a straightjacket. David Byrne wrote the postscript to our book, and he said something incredibly right-on about this. He said postmodernism originally seemed like permission to do what he liked, “but then it became a look. Time to move on.” And that’s exactly right. It became codified. The story of postmodernism is basically the story of rupture followed by exhaustion.
Jayme Odgers and April Greiman. Cover, Wet Magazine (the Magazine for Gourmet Bathers), 1979.
In the case of craft, it’s a much more substantial and long-term problem that’s not going to go away. Craft is always defined relative to these stronger forces, so that it tends to be associated with the feminine, ethnic, marginal, or regional. It’s the thing that doesn’t have the power. And more than mass production versus hand, or digital versus material, it’s actually controlling versus controlled that determines the craft relationship, craft being the controlled thing. Obviously, there have been many attempts to get out of that relationship, but it’s always going to be the thing that’s figured as traditional, historic, static, marginal, or other. That means there’s always going to be resentment and antagonism and a kind of insurrectionary feeling, as well as embarrassment and shame. There are lots of reasons to think that will continue, because it helps us think though issues of hierarchy.
BG: Whereas postmodernism stopped helping us at a certain point…
GA: Because it was grounded in a certain historical phase, whereas craft is an ever-present variable within production. Postmodernism is more like a moment. Postmodernity is just getting going—postmodernism is just its early warning sign, like the canary in the coal mine.
Glenn Adamson, PhD, is deputy head of research and head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he leads a graduate program in the History of Design. He is co-editor of the Journal of Modern Craft and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&A Publications, 2007) and The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010). Dr. Adamson’ s other publications include Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (MIT Press, 2003). His most recent project is Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 to 1990, a major exhibition and accompanying catalogue that will be on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum from September 24, 2011, to January 15, 2012.
________
NOTES:
1. Adamson, Glenn. “Handy Crafts: A Doctrine” in What Makes a Great Exhibition? (Chicago and London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 110.
2. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/p/postmodernism-style-and-subversion-1970-1990/
January 22, 2016 at 10:41am
Director of the Museum of Arts and Design Glenn Adamson Steps Down
Glenn Adamson, the Nanette L. Laitman director of the Museum of Arts and Design, is leaving his post. Adamson’s last day will be March 31, 2016. (was appointed 2013)
Adamson was at the helm of many exhibitions, including “Wendell Castle Remastered” (which is up through February 28, 2016), and “Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today” (which traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts and is up through February 28, 2016), among others. He is also responsible for “Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years,” which is slated to open in October of 2016, and “Studio Job: MAD HOUSE,” opening this March.
Chairman of the board of trustees Lewis Kruger states “Glenn has done a terrific job in leading MAD through a period of substantive institutional growth and in fostering the professionalism of our operations, and he has put a great team in place to carry forth his work. We are sorry to see him go and, on behalf of the trustees, staff, and audiences we serve, would like to thank him for all he has done for the museum.”
Managing director Robert Cundall will be the museum's interim director.
Sarah Archer, August 13, 2018
Glenn Adamson Thinks You Need Less Stuff
In his new book, curator and scholar Glenn Adamson makes the case for buying fewer but better things—the future of our planet just might depend on it
Text by
Sarah Archer
Posted August 13, 2018
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Author Glenn Adamson, whose new book
Author Glenn Adamson, whose new book Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (Bloomsbury) argues passionately for well-designed material objects in our increasingly digital age.
Courtesy of the author
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When it comes to collecting, decorating, feasting, and celebrating, even fans of Modernism are apt to flip Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum on its head: More is, actually, more. For people who really love design, it’s hard not to covet the fresh and the novel: a new collection, an updated color palette, a different material to give our homes a fresh look. We’ve been trained by generations of annual upgrading (for everything from cars to iPhones) and the long-established practice of shopping for leisure to browse, admire, and acquire things, whether our survival depends on them or not. (It usually doesn’t.) In his inspiring new book, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Object (Bloomsbury, $27), writer, curator, and former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Glenn Adamson, confronts such long-ingrained notions of materiality from several angles. Adamson invites readers to follow along on a series of thought experiments about the objects in our lives, our relationships to them, what they mean, and how we might go about distilling them so that our material footprint is greatly reduced. And this isn’t just an exercise—the future of humanity might depend on it.
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Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson (Bloomsbury)
Fewer, Better Things is deeply personal, full of stories about Adamson’s family that are by turns funny, eye-opening, and moving. He writes of his GE rocket scientist grandfather Arthur, an accomplished carpenter, who grew up in rural Depression-era Kansas with what Adamson calls “material intelligence,” and emerged from that upbringing well-prepared for a life of invention. Contrast that with anecdotes about how 21st-century children are losing the hard-earned tactile expertise of previous generations as a result of being thoroughly engaged with electronic devices, and missing out on the formative challenges of being bored and instructed to create their own play. Are human beings losing the ability to make our own fun in childhood and, in turn, to think creatively about the problems that face us as adults? Adamson is concerned that this might be the case, but his antidote is, thankfully, abundant and easy to come by.
In the book, Adamson writes of how tools like a humble fretsaw are repositories of centuries of accumulated "material intelligence."
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In Fewer, Better Things Adamson writes of how tools like a humble fretsaw are repositories of centuries of accumulated "material intelligence."
Drawing: Polly Becker, 2018/ Courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing
Though we’re living in an era of unprecedented consumerism and of virtual connectedness through smartphones and social media, we’re still the same species that once made all our own tools, living on the same planet, armed with the same curiosity. And we know that our world is in danger. In speaking with the late NASA space architect Constance Adams (who passed away earlier this year), Adamson learned what it means to design habitats for people living on a space station or perhaps on Mars, where resources are few and conditions are inhospitable—meaning every ounce of material must be carefully considered. Adams was constrained in her work by things most designers never think about: Materials that conduct electricity or “off-gas” (as many plastics do) might interfere with electronic equipment or harm living things in an enclosed space. Anything heavy is extremely high-cost in terms of fuel. Anything that could burst into flame is ill-advised in an environment where there is limited oxygen, as fire consumes oxygen very quickly.
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Seppo ("Snow Peaks"), a legendary 17th-century Japanese tea bowl poetically named for the evocative shape of the highlighted cracks in its artful repair. Adamson writes of the Japanese art of kintsugi, which uses gold in such repairs to symbolize the inherent value in beloved, well-used objects.
Drawing: Polly Becker, 2018/ Courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing
These constraints could simply be useful exercises for designers, but looking at Adams’s life’s work against the backdrop of accelerating climate change highlights the thought that ideas that sound like science fiction might become our reality sooner than we think. Even if we’re not living aboard space stations and learning to cultivate plants and trees in zero-G, changes in our own climate will force us to design for life on Earth as though it were a space adventure because, in a sense, it is. Recalling his interviews with Adams, Adamson says, “Her very simple point—that the earth is like a spaceship, only bigger—is one that Buckminster Fuller made a long time ago. But Adams was able to get across the fragility of that situation and the sense that we’re all in it together. I do think that climate change is likely to be the dominant concern for the next generation in pretty much every walk of life—design and architecture, sure, but also politics, food, clothing, transport systems. Put it this way: Everything is going to change beyond recognition, either because we deal successfully with the crisis—or because we don’t.”
A laptop's USB power cord whose frayed connection was repaired using
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A laptop's USB power cord whose frayed connection was repaired using Sugru moldable glue, a clay-like substance Adamson extols for how easily it enables the average person to fix all sorts of things, without having to consult an expert or purchase a new version.
Drawing: Polly Becker, 2018/ Courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing
The children and teenagers who expertly navigate tablets and smartphones today, swiping instinctively to the next irresistible image or video, will become the adults who engineer the future of our species. They’re living in a world that is different from the one that their parents and grandparents grew up in, and it will change even more during this century. Adamson’s point about connecting the ancient and the modern is timely. The high-tech and the self-made aren't necessarily at odds; rather, we must allow them to coexist in a sustainable manner. The conceptual tools and ways of thinking that this latest cohort of humans will need in order to adapt and survive will come not from a gleaming, high-tech future but from our own rugged, invent-or-die past. For most of human history, we had far “fewer” things, and in the future we will need “fewer and better” things in order to live as we want to on a planet with limited resources and a growing population. “We can’t expect the world population simply to stop wanting things,” Adamson says. “We have to encourage different patterns of desire, ones which are sustainable. On the most fundamental level, this is what I’m advocating: Let’s have many fewer objects in our lives and care much more about them. It’s ultimately a way of caring about one another.”
September 4, 2013
Lewis Kruger, Chairman of the Board of the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), announced today that Dr. Glenn Adamson has been appointed as the museum’s new Nanette L. Laitman Director. Adamson, who comes to MAD from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, succeeds Holly Hotchner, who stepped down at the end of April. Adamson will assume his role at the museum on October 15, 2013.
Adamson is among the most prominent and respected voices in the field of applied arts and design today. He currently leads the V&A’s Research Department, a unique cross-disciplinary department that oversees, assesses, and supports the development of museum projects, and fosters research excellence across all the museum’s activities. As Head of Research, he helps to initiate and shape major exhibitions, manages partnerships with museums and universities, and leads academic fundraising. Adamson also contributes to the V&A’s publications, educational programming, media relations, and commercial activities.
“Glenn has incredible vision and depth of knowledge in the field. He brings to MAD a strong commitment to new scholarship and to exploring process in contemporary art and design, which is at the heart of our mission. At the same time, he brings tremendous energy that will sustain and strengthen our growth as an institution,” said Kruger. “As we celebrate the fifth anniversary in our building at Columbus Circle, Glenn’s appointment marks an exciting new chapter in MAD’s trajectory, expanding the role the museum plays in New York, in the US, and around the world.”
Added Michele Cohen, chair of the Director Search Committee, “Glenn is one of the most important craft theorists working today and a respected leader in the field. His international perspective meshes perfectly with MAD’s exhibition and education program, which represents a global roster of emerging and established artists. It was this which distinguished him in our worldwide search for a new director.”
“I am honored to have been selected to serve as the next director of MAD. I began my career in museums at this institution, working as an intern just after graduating from college, and I have closely followed MAD’s development and expansion in the years since,” said Adamson. “I look forward to building on the museum’s recent successes and to working with the museum’s visionary board and senior leadership to enhance and extend MAD’s potential. I believe that we are positioned to be the leading museum dedicated to making, across all creative fields.”
In addition to his work in the Research Department, Adamson has also curated modern and contemporary design exhibitions during his tenure at the V&A, including co-curating the major survey Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 to 1990, which opened in 2011 and traveled to Italy and Switzerland, and the forthcoming exhibition The Future: A History, which will inaugurate the V&A’s new temporary exhibition galleries in 2017. He initially joined the staff in 2005 as Head of Graduate Studies, working to expand the museum’s postgraduate design course administered in conjunction with the Royal College of Art.
An advocate for the reconsideration of craft as a pervasive cultural force rather than a circumscribed artistic category, Adamson has had a widespread influence on makers as well as craft historians and theorists. He has published several books including The Invention of Craft (V&A, Bloomsbury, 2013), The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010), Thinking Through Craft (V&A, Berg, 2007), and is founding co-editor of the Journal of Modern Craft, a peer-reviewed academic journal. He has collaborated with MAD on previous projects, contributing academic essays to catalogues that accompanied the recent exhibitions Space-Light-Structure: The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta (2012) and Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (2011). He also curated Gord Peteran: Furniture Meets Its Maker, which was presented at MAD in 2009.
Prior to his work at the V&A, from 2000 to 2005, Adamson served as Curator for the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which collects and promotes research within the field of decorative arts. During this time, Adamson was responsible for organizing exhibitions, consulting on acquisitions, and development. He also served as Adjunct Curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where he organized a number of exhibitions, including the award-winning Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World(2003).
Born and raised in Boston, Adamson received his BA in Art History from Cornell University (1994) and earned his doctorate in Art History from Yale University (2001). He serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, and is the most recent recipient of the mid-career Iris Award for outstanding contribution to the decorative arts.
A Critic of a Design Museum Will Lead It
By ROBIN POGREBINSEPT. 4, 2013
The Museum of Arts and Design has named Glenn Adamson as its director, choosing a researcher without the typical executive experience who has been one of the museum’s most scathing critics.
The museum’s board called it a bold choice, and Lewis Kruger, the museum’s chairman, glossed over past criticisms. “He is knowledgeable about the subject matter, a great believer in process, a writer about process,” he said. “I think he will be a great director for us.”
Dr. Adamson, who has a doctorate in art history and most recently was director of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, will succeed a seasoned arts administrator, Holly Hotchner, who led the museum for nearly 17 years.
In a telephone interview from London, Dr. Adamson, 41, said his experience had prepared him well for the job. “I’m principally a craft specialist,” he said, adding that he spent his time at the Victoria and Albert “thinking seriously about process, materials — everything that fuels art and design practice.”
Dr. Adamson said on Tuesday that the museum was “doing a lot of things really well,” and cited the exhibition opening on Oct. 16, “Out of Hand,” which focuses on computer-assisted production of sculpture, furniture, fashion and transportation. At the same time, Dr. Adamson said that he would like to see the museum “put greater emphasis on the core mission,” that is, “making.”
Founded as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in a Victorian brownstone on West 53rd Street in 1956, the museum moved 30 years later to four floors of a new building on the block and was renamed the American Craft Museum.
In a step that was controversial among some craftmakers, the museum in 2002 changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design (affectionately called MAD) to reflect its shift in focus to include architecture, fashion, interior design, technology and performing arts, as well as crafts, art and design.
The museum persevered through a drawn-out preservation battle over its newest home, at 2 Columbus Circle. This month it celebrates its fifth anniversary in that renovated building, where the square footage more than tripled that of its previous home and annual attendance grew to 500,000 from about 40,000.
In a 2011 review in Art in America that was pegged to a show about contemporary African works, Dr. Adamson criticized the new building. “These galleries are unforgiving in their proportions — too narrow for comfort,” he wrote, “but that has not stopped the curators from packing them to the rafters.” The museum, he continued, “has little more than indiscrimination to call its own.”
Photo
Glenn Adamson Credit Hazel Thompson for The New York Times
Dr. Adamson even questioned the name change. “The new name seemed to have been chosen mainly for its vagueness — all the arts, and design too? Isn’t design one of the arts anyway?” he wrote. “Obviously, the real objective, beyond erasing the word ‘craft,’ was to eliminate all the baggage the term brought along with it.”
Ms. Hotchner fired back with a letter to the editor in Art in America: “Through our name change we hoped to change the public perception of the term ‘craft,’ so that we could use it in its true and legitimate sense. We had to face the fact that many people associate ‘craft’ with nonprofessional hobby work or even folk art. So we dropped a word that owned us, so that we could take ownership of it and use it as it should be used — as a verb, not a noun.”
The museum, with an annual operating budget of $10 million, wants to build its endowment, which is about $12 million. To do that, Dr. Adamson will have to compete with other major institutions for money at a time when corporate and government financing have declined.
Asked her opinion of his appointment, Ms. Hotchner, who stepped down in April, said: “They’ve hired a curator — that’s just a challenge. I wish him lots of luck. New York is a complicated landscape in which to raise money and that’s not his background.”
But Dr. Adamson said he had experience as an academic fund-raiser seeking research grants and that as a curator he had been involved in development work. “It’s not something that gives me any pause,” he said. “It’s one of the things I’m looking forward to.”
Mr. Kruger said the museum conducted an extensive search, assisted by a recruiter, and considered Mr. Adamson the most “exciting” candidate.
At the Victoria and Albert, Mr. Adamson had “a strategic and entrepreneurial role,” Mr. Kruger said. “If you have the kind of experience and background he has and his articulate ability, I think he will attract donors.”
Complicating matters, though, Dr. Adamson, who starts in October, will arrive just as several senior staff members are leaving, most notably David Revere McFadden, the chief curator and force behind the museum’s exhibition program, who plans to retire at the end of December.
Dr. Adamson said he would try to find someone “who can live up to” Mr. McFadden’s reputation. He also said he felt comfortable with the institution, having been an intern there 20 years ago. “It’s quite a nice feeling of coming full circle for me,” he said.
And while acknowledging that he must continue to combat the persistent bias against crafts as a less legitimate art form, Dr. Adamson said this “habit of looking down on craft people” is already changing.
Craft is “a wonderful subject area for a museum because in one sense it’s very focused and in another sense it’s very liberating,” he said. “You can look at any object and say, ‘How was it made?’ ”
He Knows What You Really Need
Gary Drevitch
Psychology Today. 51.4 (July-August 2018): p26+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/
Full Text:
GLENN ADAMSON has spent his career studying and curating well-crafted objects. Now he explains why we should bring that same ethos and appreciation into our own homes.
WHEN GLENN ADAMSON speaks to a large group, he likes to ask audience members if they can explain how, and from what materials, the chairs they're sitting in were made. Most can't. It's not just modern industrial processes that elude us, though; few people can accurately explain how a handmade vase, box, or book is created either. The pronounced and growing ignorance of the provenance of our possessions, and the cultural embrace of cheap, disposable items over well-crafted objects, are among the subjects of Adamson's new book, Fewer, Better Things. In it, the design scholar and former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York makes a powerful case for limiting our purchases to things (including food) that we find to be beautiful, meaningful, or useful. It's a goal that he believes <
Why is it important that we know how things are made? It connects us to the world and everybody in it. Once upon a time, people knew how the things around them were made because they did it themselves or knew the people who did. Now, things come to us from a great distance and are created in situations that we are totally ignorant of. It's not an insuperable challenge: You can still find out how the objects in your life are made, but it's very difficult.
Is this at some level a green goal as well? If you have a strong relationship to an object and curiosity about how it came to be, that might make you more curious about the materials it was made from and what environmental impact they might have.
That's a hard enough challenge when you're talking about a chair. It's nearly impossible for most people to describe how smartphones are assembled. These devices present themselves as portals of understanding and knowledge-and yet we are totally uninformed about the objects themselves. In addition, the digital access that they give us is very different from, and in many ways thinner than, the kind of access we have to an object through an analog mode of curiosity.
So our phones contribute to our ignorance of craft? Digital technology and craft are not incompatible: You can learn how to make a pot on YouTube, and many craftspeople are more successful financially because they sell work online. I'm not anti-technology, but I think <
It doesn't help that people now refer to noninteractive objects as "dumb." It's the natural implication of having "smart" technology: All the old stuff is dumb. The point I would make is that these "analog" objects, to use a neutral term, are repositories of generations and centuries of human knowledge, experimentation, and discovery. For example, to get all the materials into your table was difficult. But if you take that for granted, you're missing 99 percent of what we have been able to achieve as people and effectively cutting yourself off from that history.
Why might one become more attached to a well-designed chair than a well-designed phone? Analog objects only do one thing, and they do it very well: A chair is for sitting. And there is so much richness in that relationship between the body and the chair that an iPhone can't give you. It doesn't even try.
Does the decline of shop classes in school keep people from having an entry into what craft means? Absolutely. I'm not saying you should learn how to make everything before you buy it. I'm saying you should learn what it is to make something and have a feeling of what is involved. If you know how to make a simple wooden box, that's going to change your relationship to everything else, because you'll realize that every object had to go through that kind of process.
Can we reverse the trend? The drive to get everybody computer-literate understandably knocked out a lot of those shop classes, and that's a bad thing. The association of vocational education with working-class identity, and the idea that it puts you at a certain level in the economic structure, is also pernicious.
You write that objects can deliver social cohesion. How? A crafted object that you value ties you in a condition of respect to the person who made it. If you respect the object, it's likely that you're going to respect the maker as well. This is not about expensive or luxury items: What is a good object is up to you. It could be something your friend made, or that you made yourself, or something you found in an antique store that you just think is cool.
With cheap, easily consumable goods so available today, it seems our homes fill up with things we want to get rid of. The way to react to the object glut is the same way you react to the junk food glut: I realize I can have that and I can afford it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good for me. It's not just a matter of restraint; it's a matter of having <> that <
Do people involved in creative but nonmaterial pursuits, such as computer coding, have more appreciation and respect for craft? I think it's the reverse: People involved in technology or medicine or law or anything that's nonmaterial would be better at their jobs if they also had a creative pursuit. Nobel-winning scientists are much more likely than scientists in general to play music, have a craft hobby, or make art. That surely is not coincidental. Creativity is unlocked by material engagement-that hands-on, analog thing that you just can't get if your whole life is numbers and words.
How are your own craft skills? I'm not particularly handy, but because of my career I have the opportunity to visit people in making spaces and see how they do their work. I'm not saying everybody should drop what they're doing and be a craftsperson, but it is possible to generate that kind of awareness by looking and wondering, visiting workshops, asking questions, and being interested.
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Discovering how much goes into making even everyday objects is also humbling. If you inherit some amazing chair that was made in the 1920s, it's easy to say, "Well, who cares? It's out of fashion." But if you try to make one, you see: "My god, look what went into that; I could never do it." It's a positive feeling of inadequacy to look at an object and think, I could not make that. You should have a sense of wonder about that.
Do you live your ethos of fewer, better things? My partner and I-she's a painter-just bought a house. For us, it was not going to be uncomplicated to pick a place or decorate it. I want every object that passes through the door to deserve to be in the house, not because it's expensive but because it makes sense. I want to know where it came from, I want to know who made it, and ideally to have met them. I'm trying to use this opportunity to live according to walk-the-walk.
And it's worth the effort? We have a dog, and that is not efficient; there is a lot of frustration. And yet people have dogs because it gives them so much back. Our culture has not forgotten why you'd want to have a dog, but I feel that it has forgotten why you would want to have well-made things in your life. That's something we have to get back in touch with.
Caption: THEY DON'T MAKE THEM LIKE THAT ANYMORE: Adamson's lifelong interest in craft was inspired by his grandfather, born on a farm during the Depression, who became both an experimental jet-engine designer and a skilled woodcarver.
Caption: THINGS WORTH HAVING: Two eggs on a handmade plate, itself on a handmade table, in Glenn Adamson's home.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Drevitch, Gary. "He Knows What You Really Need." Psychology Today, July-Aug. 2018, p. 26+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023684/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1d4c1171. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A545023684
I want one of those
Adam Goff
New Scientist. 179.2411 (Sept. 6, 2003): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 New Scientist Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Full Text:
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens shaped your world by Glenn Adamson, MIT Press, 29.95 [pounds sterling]/$45, ISBN 0262012073
IN the economic boom years after the second world war, American industrial designers seduced the consumer into wanting products a little newer, a little better and a lot sooner than was necessary. Brooks Stevens was in the thick of the sales pitch. In a phrase coined by Stevens himself, "planned obsolescence" became the norm.
By his own admission, Stevens and his designers were omnipresent. "You cannot mention a product that we might not of touched somewhere. I mean, if you said refrigerators, washing machines, lawnmowers, outboards, boats, airplanes ... Think of something and ask if we've had anything to do with it." Industrial Strength Design gives great insight into how that new take on design massively manipulated the consumer's appetite to acquire goods, only to discard them in favour of the next latest thing.
Goff, Adam
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Goff, Adam. "I want one of those." New Scientist, 6 Sept. 2003, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A107754692/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=49aa2108. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A107754692
Prophet of profit
Craig M. Vogel
American Scientist. 92.2 (March-April 2004): p192+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
http://www.americanscientist.org/
Full Text:
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. Glenn Adamson. xii + 219 pp. The MIT Press and Milwaukee Art Museum, 2003. $45.
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World is the story of a man, a time and the emergence of an idea--the 20th-century American concept of innovation, which after World War II helped to create an "American Style" that was successfully exported worldwide. Of course, that thrust for innovation also helped to hasten the environmental problems inherent in planned obsolescence--an approach Brooks Stevens unabashedly promoted, claiming to have originated this term, which he defined as "the desire to own something a little newer and a little better, a little sooner than necessary." Stevens's early work celebrated optimistic future-oriented consumerism, and he wrapped everything Americans purchased, from peanut butter to automobiles, in that optimism. The products he designed--the Harley-Davidson Hydra-Glide motorcycle, Evinrude outboard motors, Lawn-Boy mowers, Mirro cookware, the Jeep Wagoneer and the Miller beer bottle (to list but a few)--are house-hold names.
Industrial Strength Design was published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Milwaukee Art Museum in the summer of 2003. (Information about and photographs of Stevens and his work can be found on the museum's Web site, at http://www.mam.org/exhibitions/_sites/brooks/.) The book, copiously illustrated, opens with three essays assessing Stevens's career and then surveys his work chronologically in some detail, serving as an introduction to the field he helped develop.
The term industrial designer came into use in the mid-1920s to describe a new group of professionals who were assisting American manufacturers in their efforts to make products more competitive by improving their visual appearance and utility while taking into account human factors, such as ergonomics. Formal education of designers started during the 1930s but did not become widespread until after World War II. Pioneers in the field came from a number of disciplines, including illustration, set design, fine art and architecture.
Industrial design is part science and part art. Aesthetics and style must be balanced against market trends, human factors and materials science, and designers must be literate in emerging technology. Anyone who is, as Stevens was, the head of a design consulting firm must also be an expert in salesmanship.
The years of Stevens's most active practice, from 1934 to 1970, marked a golden age of product design. By the end of the 1930s, American companies widely accepted the need for industrial designers, who were being used, among other things, to develop pavilions and exhibits for the 1939 New York World's Fair. After World War II the United States emerged as the largest producer-consumer nation in the world. Opportunities for product design and redesign were seemingly unlimited.
Stevens was poised to take full advantage of this unique period in American history. He had received sales training from his father (who was vice president of engineering for a machine tool firm) and had acquired skills in visualization and model making in his youth while recuperating from polio; he had also spent a few years in architecture school at Cornell. In addition, he had grown up in Milwaukee and was able to leverage his small-city relationships there (Ralph Evinrude had been a high school pal) as many of its companies began major American brands. The work Stevens and his firm designed outright or influenced touches every American to this day.
This book provides an excellent overview of Stevens's various creations. Designers make the claim that, given the technical specifications of any product and information about the market for it, they can find an appropriate solution; the same methods of innovation used for a train can be used for a clothes iron. The proof of the claim lies in the scope of work represented here: Stevens's consulting firm was able to take raw technology and give it style in a wide range of projects. What is more, Stevens and his partners developed the concept of the corporate laboratory for product aesthetics. (More information about Stevens and his designs can be found at the Web site for the company that still bears his name [http://www.brooksstevens.com].)
Stevens believed that as product technology changes, the product's packaging, its physical envelope and the means it offers users for interaction (its controls, for example) should also change. It may be necessary to alter the look of the exterior because of trends in fashion and entertainment, advances in ergonomics, or changes in how people make use of the product. Also, companies have to redefine and update their corporate identity and the appearance of their products to compete effectively and differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Stevens understood all these factors and balanced them in his designs. His work conveys a sense of exuberance, optimism and confidence. It reflects the spirit of the age, a time when Americans were able to consume without conscience--when the broken promise of a chicken in every pot was replaced by the realizable dream of two cars in every garage, when Disneyland captured the public imagination and television took over the American home.--Craig M. Vogel, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University
RELATED ARTICLE
Industrial designer Brooks Stevens was 50 years old and at the top of his profession when this photo was taken in 1961. At right are a number of his creations: (clockwise from top left) the Scimitar town car (1959), which was made at the request of aluminum manufacturer Olin Mathiesson, to demonstrate the efficiency of making cars from that metal; the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (1958); the Miller High Life beer bottle (1953); the Edmilton Company's Petipoint clothes iron (1941); the streamlined engine of the Midwestern luxury train the Olympian Hiawatha (1947); the Hamilton clothes dryer (1944); and the 45-ft. Zephyr land yacht (1936), a two-part vehicle commissioned by Milwaukee millionaire playboy William Woods Plankinton, Jr. The front portion of the Zephyr was constructed on the chassis of an International Harvester truck cab; held two foldout beds, wardrobe closets, a refrigerator, a radio and a foldout wash basin; and had an 80-gallon water tank in the roof. The long trailer to the rear slept seven people and had a living room with gun and fishing-rod racks, a full kitchen and a bathroom with a shower. From Industrial Strength Design.
Vogel, Craig M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vogel, Craig M. "Prophet of profit." American Scientist, vol. 92, no. 2, 2004, p. 192+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A113930428/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a1cc948. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A113930428
Adamson, Glenn: FEWER, BETTER
THINGS
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Adamson, Glenn FEWER, BETTER THINGS Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 8, 7 ISBN: 978-1-
63286-964-7
The impact and significance of the objects we shape and live with.
Adamson (Senior Scholar/Yale Center for British Art; The Invention of Craft, 2013, etc.) writes that "we are
in danger of falling out of touch, not only with objects, but with the intelligence they embody: the empathy
that is bound up in tangible things." He takes us on a winding, personal tour of material intelligence, the
world of things; sadly, "our collective material intelligence has steadily plummeted." The author seeks to
paint a "full, kaleidoscopic picture of material experience. Making things, using them, and learning about
them." The book is rich with examples and stories of objects and their makers. Early on, Adamson invites
us to take the "Paper Challenge": What is the best way to evenly divide a piece of paper? He also asks why
the materiality of stuffed animals is significant, and he writes in awe about how experts split diamonds and
the importance of tools. A fretsaw, a laser cutter, a Jacquard loom--all are "repositories of accumulated
material intelligence." Adamson discusses the importance of touch in making and appreciating things. A
visit to Brussels Musical Instruments Museum teaches us how to navigate the displays with our ears as well
as our eyes. The author also provides brief history lessons on plywood, aluminum, vulcanized rubber,
linoleum, and how a material "rises into fashion, falls out of fashion, then rises again." He introduces us to
many fascinating people and their achievements: "one of America's greatest basket makers" Dorothy Gill
Barnes; master woodcarver David Esterly; Ian Hutchings, who's "interested in what happens when things
rub up against one another;" Murage Ngani Ngatho, master coconut carver; and Constance Adams, a "space
architect" for NASA. Interested in footwear? Belgian design researcher Catherine Willems combines
"ancient wisdom with new technologies" studying sandals made with reindeer, buffalo, and antelope skin.
<
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Adamson, Glenn: FEWER, BETTER THINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fc4a4f2b.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543008710
Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden
Wisdom of Objects
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects
Glenn Adamson. Bloomsbury, $27 (272p)
ISBN 978-1-63286-964-7
Adamson, the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and author of The Craft
Reader, challenges readers to reconsider the nature of physical objects in this dry treatise on material
culture. He asserts that mass production eroded the understanding of craftsmanship and that reconnecting
with processes and materials increases one's overall quality of life. The book is most successful when
drawing on everyday items, like a chair. Instead of just something to sit on, he asks readers to consider the
wood, the techniques binding it together, and the cultural significance of its design. Adamson writes
enthusiastically of how the aesthetics of Japanese tea ceremonies reveal other elements of society (the
texture of the clay tea bowl, for example, denotes its provenance). Although almost all readers will find
value in some of these anecdotes, Adamson too often veers into academic territory, such as his extended
discussion of museum theory. While some examples are more illuminating than others, the book will
awaken those who have tuned out from their surroundings. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 64. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099985/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=edd139f6. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099985
Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft
Jennifer Naimzadeh
Library Journal.
138.17 (Oct. 15, 2013): p94.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft. Bloomsbury Academic. 2013, 243p. illus. index. ISBN
9780857850669. pap. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9780857850645. DEC ARTS
Adamson, head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, follows up his 2007 title Thinking Through
Craft with this work. Here he attempts to turn the traditional narrative of craft on its head; rather than
arguing that the Industrial Revolution heralded the end of craft, Adamson seeks to redefine this point as the
beginning of the modern craft period. Through case studies and detailed research in the fields of history and
art history and an excellent sociological history of America and England during the time period, he does a
fine job of arguing his case. The work is written well and provides a thought-provoking take on the subject.
Students and other scholars of art history and the philosophy of art will find many uses for this work, but
few public library patrons will have the patience for material that reads like a textbook. VERDICT
Recommended for only the largest libraries and only where there is very strong interest in the academic
study of art history.--Jennifer Naimzadeh, Richland Lib., Columbia, SC
Naimzadeh, Jennifer
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Naimzadeh, Jennifer. "Adamson, Glenn. The Invention of Craft." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2013, p. 94.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A344826778/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=01f724eb. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A344826778
Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks
Stevens Shaped your World
Publishers Weekly.
250.33 (Aug. 18, 2003): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
EDITED BY GLENN ADAMSON. MIT, $45 (220p) ISBN 0-262-01207-3
Dismissing the "modernist snobs" of his era, Stevens (1911-1995) concentrated instead on what in style was
salable, and more or less revolutionized American mid-century industrial design and packaging: the station
wagon, the clothes dryer window, the wide-mouthed peanut-butter jar, the Oscar Mayer Wiener-mobile and
the "Skylark" (or "boomerang") graphic for Formica are just a few of his or his eponymous firm's
contributions. This book accompanies an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, but it is<< uncommonly>> (and
fittingly)<< well designed and visually compelling>> itself. Along with the three other scholars who contribute
essays, Chipstone Foundation curator Adamson has a good feel for the social and economic character of the
'40s and '50s ("Stevens' Best Years," as one chapter heading puts it) and describes the designs clearly and
with sympathy: "This logo was an ingenious creation in itself, in which the 3 and the m were the same
shape but rotated ninety degrees from each other." Many pages are a period-evoking cyan rather than white,
giving good contrast to the 250 photos and illustrations (40 in color). Anyone who lived in the United States
between 1940 and 1975 will recognize the world of this hook. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped your World." Publishers Weekly, 18 Aug. 2003,
p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A107491118/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f5630840. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A107491118
Adamson, Glenn. Art in the making: artists and their materials from the studio to crowdsourcing
A. Calluori Holcombe
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.3 (Nov. 2016): p366+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Adamson, Glenn. Art in the making: artists and their materials from the studio to crowdsourcing, by Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson. Thames & Hudson, 2016. 247p index ISBN 9780500239339 cloth, $39.95
(cc) 54-1030
N7430
MARC
This book is generous with images (200 photographs) but thin on text. Adamson (Museum of Arts and Design, New York) and Bryan-Wilson (Univ. of California, Berkeley) admit to spreading the content out over time, space, and topic, but this results in a treatment that lacks the depth the subject deserves. Primarily, the authors describe how contemporary art is made. Working with assistants, in factories, and within collectives is not a new development for artists, yet it seems more common in recent years. In this scenario, the artist controls concept and design but less so production. In looking at artists and their practice, the authors devote chapters to materials, tools, and a wide variety of media. Among the pivotal artists covered are Judy Chicago, Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst, and Cory Arcangel. In the conclusion, the authors plead for artists working in this method of "distributed authorship" to credit the people involved in production, as is customary in the film industry. Visually, the cover is uninviting, and the page layouts are crowded, with limited white space. Detailed notes and a bibliography serve the book well, pointing readers to more serious scholarship. Summing Up: * Optional. Lower-division undergraduates and above, including students in technical programs; professionals and practitioners.--A. Calluori Holcombe, University of Florida
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Holcombe, A. Calluori. "Adamson, Glenn. Art in the making: artists and their materials from the studio to crowdsourcing." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2016, p. 366+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A469640458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd96e125. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469640458
Adamson, Glenn. The invention of craft
K.L. Ames
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 51.2 (Oct. 2013): p243+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
51-0654
TT15
2012-49664 MARC
Adamson, Glenn. The invention of craft. Bloomsbury, 2013. 243p index ISBN 9780857850645, $100.00; ISBN 9780857850669 pbk, $29.95
Adamson (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) has become a major voice in craft studies. Author of Thinking through Craft (2007), editor of The Craft Reader (CH, Dec'10, 48-1860), and an editor of the Journal of Modern Craft, Adamson here offers <
Ames, K.L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ames, K.L. "Adamson, Glenn. The invention of craft." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2013, p. 243+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A347001872/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4ab3b9f4. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A347001872
Postmodernism: style and subversion, 1970-1990
D.E. Gliem
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 49.12 (Aug. 2012): p2265+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
49-6680
NX456
2011-923018 MARC
Postmodernism: style and subversion, 1970-1990, ed. by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt. V&A Publishing, 2011. 319p bibl index ISBN 9781851776597, $75.00
This splendid exhibition catalogue accompanied a groundbreaking show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Both the show and the catalogue are ambitious endeavors to chronicle the impact of the nebulous postmodernism movement on design during the 20-year period from 1970 to 1990. The complexity of the subject matter is reflected in the rich and far-reaching essays, which incorporate discussion of architecture, fashion, music, television, graphic design, furniture and interior design, product design, and mote, on a global scale. The impressive cadre of 42 contributors includes Denise Scott Brown and Charles Jencks, to name but two. Indeed, what distinguishes this volume from the typical exhibition catalogue is its comprehensiveness and the depth of the discussion of the subject. Included with these informative essays are numerous color illustrations.<< An absolutely engaging read>>, this catalogue is highly recommended for all readers and is indispensable for schools with design programs. Summing Up: Essential. **** Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.--D. E. Gliem, Eckerd College
Gliem, D.E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gliem, D.E. "Postmodernism: style and subversion, 1970-1990." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2012, p. 2265+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A299989601/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aede0b5a. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A299989601
The Craft reader
B.L. Herman
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 48.4 (Dec. 2010): p668.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-1860
TT149
2009-41648
MARC
The Craft reader, ed. by Glenn Adamson. Berg, 2010. 641p bibl index ISBN 9781847883049, $129.95; ISBN 9781847883032 pbk, 539.95
The Craft Reader offers a thoughtful compilation of essays charting the artistic, philosophical, and ideological course of craft, generously defined as "the application of skill and material-based knowledge to relatively small scale production." This open-ended definition sets the stage for approaching<< craft as a constellation of ideas and practices in the service of an art and aesthetics of the everyday>>, manifest in objects ranging from handmade furniture to chocolates. Like other collections published by Berg, e.g., Empire of the Senses (2005), edited by D. Howes, and The Taste Culture Reader (2005), edited by C. Korsmeyer, this new volume covers its topic with laudable depth and breadth. Adamson divides his collection of 76 selections into 7 sections that range from the 19th-century origins of the craft movement to the contemporary, prefacing each section and essay with an insightful contextual introduction. This book serves three important functions: (1) as a collection readily tailored for individual teaching needs; (2) as a reference work (enhanced by a brief, well-focused bibliography and strong index); and (3) as an effective assessment of the state of the field. The collection's generous critical reach renders the anthology useful to makers, researchers, and teachers. Summing Up. Recommended. ** Lower-level undergraduates and above.--B. L. Herman, University of North Carolina
Herman, B.L.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Herman, B.L. "The Craft reader." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Dec. 2010, p. 668. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249221782/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=212d6b1e. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249221782
Postmodernism, at V&A, Seven magazine review
The V&A hopes its new Postmodernism exhibition will be a blockbuster – in reality, it's just a labyrinth of bad taste, says Andrew Graham-Dixon
2 out of 5 stars
Postmodernism
Image 1 of 2
Grace Jones maternity dress, 1979. Photo: Jean-Paul Goude
By Andrew Graham-Dixon4:10PM BST 30 Sep 2011
Postmodernism is a singularly slippery term. What was it coined to describe? A style? A movement? A period of history? An intellectual attitude? A little bit of all of those things? The V&A’s exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, a vast and sense-stunning display encompassing pretty much every art form, raises all of those questions again. Anyone entering its labyrinth would be advised to bring their own thread.
Insofar as Postmodernism was ever truly a style, it was one born out of a spirit of rejection – a rejection of the values that Modernism itself was presumed to stand for. So if Modernism represented purity, clarity, singleness of purpose and a belief in progress, Postmodernism embraced confusion and plurality. The clearest expressions of this were to be found in architecture and design.
A building such as the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie of 1977-84, by James Stirling, was exemplary: spatially disorientating and stylistically eclectic, formed from a bewildering collage of pastiche elements drawn from the architectural vocabularies of the Greek, Roman and Egyptian past, combined with hi-tech detailing (including a glass curtain wall and garishly green rubber floors).
So too were the Milanese designs of Ettore Sottsass, leader of the Memphis group. His Casablanca sideboard was a riotously colourful, theatrically exuberant riposte to the pared-down, form-follows-function aesthetic of high modernist design: a hopelessly impractical object, with its sloping, open-ended bookshelves, brandished like the arms and legs of some strange computer-game biomorph, clad in brightly coloured plastic laminate.
But Postmodernism was far more pervasive as a set of ideas than it ever was as a set of styles. Articulated by writers such as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, it prompted a seismic shift in ways of thinking about art. Advocates of the postmodern approach to art history called for an end to the so-called “grand narrative” account, traditionally presented by an institution such as the MoMA in New York. The idea that the story of modern art was essentially one of straight-line progress, a tale of evolving “isms” from Cubism to Dadaism to Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism and beyond, was fatally weakened by postmodern thinkers.
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Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 26 Sep 2011
They pointed out, with good sense, that art is simply not like that. It does not advance, it merely changes, and it’s the job of museums to reflect that. We should revel in art’s polyvalent, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinarian glory.
The openness of the postmodern approach was refreshing, but it came at a certain cost – to put it mildly – in quality control and clarity. For better or worse, the non-linear, theme-driven, non-stop visual bombardment of a trip to Tate Modern is the direct consequence of postmodern ideas.
The problem for the curators of Postmodernism, Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, has been twofold: how to make an exhibition out of such an amorphous subject, and how to make one capable of filling the enormous suite of galleries set aside for what V&A bosses clearly hope will be a blockbuster.
Those difficulties are compounded by the fact that architecture, arguably the prime example of postmodern style, is unexhibitable other than through drawings and photographs. Their solution is bold if not intellectually rigorous.
They have embraced what they take to be the guiding principle of Postmodernism, namely its spirit of naked, freewheeling eclecticism, and applied it to the creation of what is essentially a survey of period style.
So room has been found for any and every form of cultural expression from 1970 to 1990, just so long as it conforms to certain supposed postmodern standards, such as pastiche, irony, playfulness and a general fascination with urban chaos. The result is<< a bewildering journey through all kinds of unpredictable hinterlands of taste,>> a passage through seemingly endless rooms and corridors filled with white noise and film flicker, an assault course of images and objects ranging from high culture to low.
The viewer’s ever-moving eye thus flits from a hologram of Boy George to a loop of film from Blade Runner; from photograps of Grace Jones to Kraftwerk album covers; from Jeff Koons’s kitsch silver bust of Louis XIV to the urban chaos of Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi.
The exhibition has a kind of eloquence about its subject, in that it feels like a living example of Postmodernism: a tangible consequence, in the field of museum display, of the kaleidoscopic thought patterns and manic eclecticism that lay at its core. Having said that, visiting the show is far from pleasant. It’s rather like having your brain gradually liquidised.
To Jan 15; www.vam.ac.uk
This review also appears in Seven magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph
Postmodernism? London's V&A museum attempts a definition
Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Karl Lagerfeld and Ridley Scott to be represented at Style and Subversion exhibition
Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Mon 28 Feb 2011 12.58 EST First published on Mon 28 Feb 2011 12.58 EST
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Jenny Holzer's Monument
American artist Jenny Holzer, whose work includes Monument (2008), will be represented at Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at London's V&A museum. Photograph: Mark Pinder for the Guardian
If, in the 1980s, you were making tea with your Alessi kettle, checking the time on your Swatch and humming along to your new Eurythmics album you may be able to call yourself a postmodernist. But then there is another question – did you have an ironic smile on your face as you filled the shiny, expensive, piece of kit?
The definition of postmodernism is a thorny one and is not lost on the curators of the biggest style show dedicated to the movement. "We talked about it endlessly for three years," said Jane Pavitt. "There were many, many definitions that we put forward."
Pavitt and co-curator Glenn Adamson have unveiled details of the V&A's big autumn exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, which will encompass music, art, film, fashion and architecture. It completes a series of shows at the London museum dedicated to 20th-century style movements that has included art deco and modernism.
Postmodernism is tricky because of its enormous variety and lack of distinctive look. Some people even consider it a term of abuse. Or praise.
Pavitt conceded it might "seem strange or perhaps perverse, foolhardy even," for the V&A to put on a big postmodernism show. "After all, here is a subject that, at its moment, defied categorisation and resisted authority. Many of its protagonists even denied its existence."
What can be said is that postmodernism was loud colours, bold patterns, historical quotation and a good degree of wit. Adamson said: "We are not saying that postmodernism looked like this, because postmodernism looked like many things and incited debate above all. What we can say is that postmodernism was an attack on what had come before; it was an attack on modernism."
The curators insist the subject is ripe for exploration and plan to show how postmodernism helped change the look of cities as well as having a profound effect on popular culture and fashion.
There will be a strong architectural element to the show and the launch was held in one of London's most stridently postmodernist buildings: James Stirling's No 1 Poultry. Featuring in the show will also be designs for Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, an excellent example of postmodern architectural pastiche.
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There will be 6ft-high presentation drawings of the designs for Philip Johnson's controversial AT&T building in New York. "It's the ultimate postmodern joke," said Pavitt, "a glitzy, pink-pink granite clad skyscraper topped with a Chippendale style pediment and adorned with historicist quotations. One can't underestimate the level of outrage in response to this project."
Visual art will be represented by Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Jenny Holzer and popular culture highlights including a reconstruction of singer/actor Grace Jones's extraordinary maternity dress (right), an angular, colourful, bump-hiding affair designed by her lover and guru Jean-Paul Goude.
Other fashions on show include creations by designers Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood and baggy, oversized clothes from the label Comme de Garçons.
Examples of postmodern film will include Derek Jarman's Last of England and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, with its remarkable mixing of genres and styles.
In the final room, visitors will be able to leave on a high by watching the pop video made by Robert Longo for 1986 New Order single Bizarre Love Triangle.
• Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 is at the V&A from 24 September 2011-8 January 2012.