What is luxury?

A museum stuffed with treasures in one of the wealthiest boroughs of one of the world’s most expensive cities; a city with the highest levels of poverty in a country with a government widening the socio-economic divide. This is the setting for “What is Luxury?”, which recently opened at London’s V&A. It could have made for a conspicuous celebration of a luxury industry flourishing in inequitable times. Instead this compact show challenges the very idea of what luxury is and what it means in today. 

Co-curated by V&A curator Jana Scholze and visiting research fellow Leanne Wierzba, “What is Luxury?” is the last of three exhibitions jointly organised by the V&A and the Crafts Council. This started with 2007’s “Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft”, which examined contemporary artists’ turn to the handmade, and was followed by 2011’s “Power of Making”, a hugely popular show celebrating the contemporary craft revival. While varied in scope and approach, they shared an emphasis on craftsmanship also found here: “What is Luxury?” focuses on production rather than mediation or consumption, although these are addressed within the exhibits.

The exhibition is organised into four themed sections, all based on interrogating luxury. The first, “Creating Luxury”, is the most overtly luxurious; spot lit vitrines in a darkened gallery space emphasise the preciousness of the exhibits. Display cases are labelled with key terms such as “precision”, “exclusivity” and “expertise”, which the curators wisely offer in lieu of any constraining definition of luxury. While the emphasis is on the contemporary, this section includes historic examples from the V&A’s collection, making for some interesting juxtapositions. Placed together under the subheading “precision” is a seventeenth century lace and silk Venetian ecclesiastical garment and a mechanical watch by Swiss firm Vacheron Constantin (2007). Created centuries apart and for a radically different clientele, the artefacts share the same exquisite perfection.

The watch exemplifies one of the exhibition’s unifying themes; time. This is present in the ten years Italian goldsmith Giovanni Corvaja took to master spinning gold into thread, and the 2,500 hours this technique took to realise The Golden Fleece (2009) headpiece, made from 160 km of gold thread. The absurdity of this endeavour is something that the curators recognise; often the producers of luxury artefacts are making for no one other than themselves. Temporality also underpins the central work in this section: Canadian designer Philippe Malouin’s Time Elapsed (2011) for Lobmeyr. This space-age kinetic sculpture slowly draws a circular pattern in sand  – an apt material to represent both the immaterial and material ingredient of the Austrian firm’s opulent glassware.

There are more subversive offerings amongst these spectacles. Paulo Goldstein’s Repair is Beautiful celebrates the agency of small-scale repair when faced with seemingly un-fixable phenomena such as our financial crisis – oddly this critical component was omitted in the object’s label.  This material critique of an abstract system is also present in the second and smallest section, A Space for Time. This includes El Ultimo Grito’s A Rematerialisation of Systems, Body I and Body II (2014). The design duo’s installation of interlinked clear glass vessels was conceived to show the illusionary nature of the apparent transparency and freedom of the world we inhabit.

This combination of materiality and negative tone was present in The Future of Luxury section.  Much of its exhibits used the often-fictional language of speculative design to comment on the reality of today’s luxury industry, in which the visitor (as consumer) is complicit. Aram Moordian’s A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions (2011) examines the effects of gold mining on the communities and landscape of the Australian outback. It was produced in collaboration with Unknown Field Division, who were responsible for one of the exhibition’s most powerful displays. Rare Earthenware is a trio of vessels made from the radioactive sludge that is a pernicious by-product of manufacturing consumer technologies such as laptops and smartphones. The fact that many of us consider these objects as necessities, rather than luxuries, only enforced the disturbing nature of the damage caused by our technological lust and the divisions between the producers and consumers of such products.

The final section “What is Your Luxury?” contains just one exhibit – a film made by London design studio Committee. The Last Man is an on-going project that encourages you to imagine you are the only person on earth. With the world at your disposal, and freed from all socio-cultural, economic and political constraints, what you would make?  The film is a sort of animated adhocism, as objects are continuously created, destroyed and transformed into new artefacts. As the final exhibit, The Last Man affirms the questioning attitude of the exhibition that I’d have liked to see even more of. We need more public discussion on the socio-economic context that luxury operates in. Stepping out of the museum and into London’s streets, it wasn’t clear that the luxury industry and all it represents would be unfortunately little troubled by this inquisitive and thought-provoking intervention.

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until 27 September 2015
What is Luxury?
Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, London