Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences: 3 Papers

R&D, economics of science, science funding, EU

Designing the Welfare State: Design and the Public Realm in Britain 1945-70

This research paper examined ways in which design and architecture were utilised in the creation of the British Welfare State after 1945, and through the period of political consensus until the 1970s. It explored how far ideas of scientific rationalism, technocracy and ‘systems thinking’ underpinned design in the service of health, housing and education during this period; what forms of ‘experimental’ thinking were applied, and to what end. In particular, it considered how architecture and design interacted with the cultures of expertise (in planning, policy and science, for example) shaping the postwar public realm. The paper is part of an ongoing research enquiry into the design, built and material cultures of the Welfare state system

Abstracts from the NIHR INVOLVE Conference 2017

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The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce.

Pavitt’s essay explores the work of Italian designer and architect Gaetano Pesce from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Once a prominent figure whose activities were widely reported in the international design press, Pesce had not previously been the subject of sustained scholarly analysis by design historians. Pavitt’s essay is an original examination of Pesce’s use of materials (mainly plastic) and spaces (underground) and the ways in which they invoked a sense of anxiety and instability in response to pressing social conditions at the height of the cold war and the economic crisis of the early 1970s. Focusing on the exhibits and archival and documentary material relating to a number of key exhibitions in Pesce’s career, including ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Achievements and Problems of Italian Design’ (MOMA, 1972) and his one-man show, ‘Le Futur est peut-être passé’ (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1975), Pavitt demonstrates how his use of materials and spaces can be seen as an attempt to critically address the core themes of modernism in design. Pavitt also puts Pesce’s design in the context of pan-European ideas about the role of the body in performance. This essay resulted partly from research conducted by Pavitt for two exhibitions which she co-curated for the V&A Museum: ‘Cold War Modern’ (V&A, 2008–9) and ‘Postmodernism’ (V&A, 2011–12), as well as a separate examination of Pesce’s work based on archival research in the designer’s studio. The research was first presented at the annual Association of Art Historians conference at the University of Glasgow, 2010, as part of a session entitled ‘Anxious Spaces/Postwar Homes’. Pavitt’s research led to the inclusion of Pesce’s work in the form of drawings and objects in the ‘Postmodernism’ exhibition, and the acquisition of a major work for the V&A’s collections

Design Client, Patron and Showcase: the Museum and the Creative Industries, in Guy Julier & Liz Moor (eds), Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice.

Pavitt’s essay discusses the parallel discourses of ‘creativity’ employed by the British Labour government and the public museums in the UK during the late 1990s and early years of the 21st century. Focusing on the case of the V&A Museum, Pavitt examines the real and imagined roles of the public museum in the formation of a ‘creative industries strategy’ by government, as well as the public presentation of contemporary design. In particular, Pavitt contrasts the uncertain approach to creativity articulated by different branches of government with an expanded emphasis on active and participatory creativity that is being embraced in the museum sector. Drawing on her extensive research and curatorial practice in this field while she was University of Brighton Principal Research Fellow in Design at the V&A Museum (1997–2010), Pavitt examined a number of policy documents and reports produced by government departments (in particular the Department of Culture, Media and Sport), museums and think tanks, as well as the audience research data gathered by the V&A. Pavitt analysed the varying impacts of these strategic statements on curatorial strategies, gallery design and event organisation as well as on learning and interpretation strategies at the V&A during the period. This is set in the longer history of the museum, and in particular its founding aim of stimulating British design. Pavitt was invited to research and write this essay after speaking at two workshops in 2007, entitled ‘Counting Creativity’, co-organised by the Design Council London and Leeds Metropolitan University. The workshops brought together design professionals and academics to consider the relationship of the creative industries to business and government, and how changes in political attitudes have affected the processes and practices of design

Design History on Display?

This paper was prepared for a conference reviewing developments in the discipline of design history, including its impact on writing, broadcasting and museums. The paper explored the impact of design history upon the making of exhibitions. There is arguably a difference between museum exhibitions which deal with specific aspects of the history of design (whether monograph, period, or style) and those which also take a specifically 'design history' approach to research and curating, applying the kinds of questions, contexts and methodologies employed by the design historian. In research and teaching, design history has challenged judgements of taste, value and status applied to objects in museums (and to designers and movements in the museum canon). But how far has it informed the development of new curatorial approaches and subjects? Does much of design history's subject matter still reside outside of the curatorial field? This paper employed a number of case-studies of V&A exhibitions in the last 15 years