The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The Do What You Want Decade
As far as can be established, Che Guevara, Argentinian medical student turned Cuban revolutionary, never met Lesley Hornby, the former hairdresser’s assistant from Neasden turned Sixties supermodel Twiggy. The LSD guru Timothy Leary might have urged America to turn on, tune in, drop out, but there is no record of the Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders heeding the call.
Yet all, in their own way, were instrumental in the revolution in culture and politics that swept across the Western world in the Sixties, and all feature in a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, You Say You Want A Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970. Tying together the elements that comprised what we know as the Sixties – drugs, music, the rise of disposable income among the young, the challenge to authority and convention, the sexual revolution – is a formidable task, and You Say You Want A Revolution? doesn’t lack for scale and ambition. This could easily have been divided into five different exhibitions, such is the profusion and variety of exhibits on display: psychedelic posters, underground magazines, images of riot, war, drugs, Swinging Sixties fashion; along with photographs and memorabilia of the icons of the age: Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground; the Black Panther Huey Newton; the Beatles (of course); Jimi Hendrix; Mao and Allen Ginsberg – naked but for a hotel “do not disturb” sign. ( The latter was taken at a London party in 1965, also attended by John Lennon, there with his wife Cynthia, who took one look at Ginsberg and hissed: “You don’t do that in front of the birds.” Three years later a liberated Lennon was doing it in front of everyone.)
The exhibition has been curated by Victoria Broakes and Geoffrey Marsh, who were responsible for the David Bowie exhibition in 2013 – the fastest-selling in V&A history, seen by more than 310,000 people.
“With Bowie, we recognised that covering music not from the musical standpoint but from the contextual standpoint had been a huge hit with the public and something that no other museum in the world was doing in the same way,” Broakes says. “Following that, we had a lot of bands saying ‘Do you want to do us next?’ But we wanted to step back from that and look at the revolutions that were inspired and carried by the music in the Sixties, and the people who were driving those things forward.” (Next year the V&A is staging a major Pink Floyd retrospective.)
Moving through a series of themed rooms – Swinging Sixties fashion, political upheaval, the drug culture, consumerism – the exhibition illustrates how in an age before social media, rock music became the principal vehicle and soundtrack for the dissemination of countercultural ideas, whether in the coded (and not so coded) references to drug use and social dissent and change, or as a platform for style and design (250 album covers from the period, borrowed from the late John Peel’s collection, form a kind of frieze running through the exhibition rooms).
A section on the “Revolution in Gatherings” focuses on the music festivals. A collection of ephemera shows how Woodstock was planned, quite literally, on a single piece of paper, and that Jimi Hendrix was paid $30,000 for his appearance.
More than simply an exercise in “oh wow” nostalgia, the exhibition seeks to draw the connecting lines between the past and the present. “A Revolution In Communication” looks at the “back to the land” communalism that gave rise to the visionary Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog – a do-it-yourself manual offering everything from building a geodesic dome, to access to the Hewlett Packard 9100A tabletop calculator, and which Steve Jobs would describe as “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”.
While the sheer number and diversity of exhibits can be overwhelming (“We don’t expect everybody to look at everything”, Marsh says), much of the pleasure comes from the unexpected conjunctions, from the Souper Dress – a paper dress produced by the Campbell’s Soup Company and based on Andy Warhol’s artwork – to the spacesuit worn by William Anders (who snapped the Earth from the Moon in the iconic photograph, Earthrise, in 1968); from the stark demands of the Black Panther manifesto (all black men held in prisons and jails to be freed; black people only to be tried by black juries) to the dazzling, kaleidoscopic fantasies of psychedelic poster-art, combining Mucha, Beardsley and Rackham.
Recently, the Sixties has become the object of cultural and political revisionism – attacked as a time of flippancy and naivety, less the cradle of utopian idealism and selfexpressionism than of hedonism, self-gratification and all the social ills that plague us now. But what the exhibition illustrates is how for better or worse, the period changed the way we live and think.
For Marsh, the principal legacy of that era is one of personal freedom and equality.
A major new exhibition shows how the hedonism of the Sixties changed our lives forever, says Mick Brown