{"id":1452,"date":"2009-09-06T14:21:47","date_gmt":"2009-09-06T18:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=1452"},"modified":"2009-09-15T05:27:06","modified_gmt":"2009-09-15T09:27:06","slug":"the-victoria-and-albert-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2009\/09\/the-victoria-and-albert-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"The Victoria and Albert Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No museum\u00a0 has affected me as viscerally as\u00a0The Victoria and Albert Museum<\/a> in South Kensington. Immediately upon entering the museum I was struck by the sight of life-sized Rodin<\/a> sculptures of the human body that were raised above eye level, which created, for me, a sense of the insignificance of the appreciator, and likewise, the\u00a0importance of art\u00a0over all things. These sculptures\u00a0were grotesque; Rodin used a technique that rendered them black and raw-looking, as if they had once been alive and thrown into a fire, then the charred remains removed and put on display. Though they were shocking and somewhat disturbing, Rodin’s pieces elicited in me a very emotional response, one that cut to the core of my perceptions of the self and of humanity, and one that I can neither\u00a0explain nor recreate for the reader. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I also really enjoyed seeing several sculptures by Alfred Stevens, including a copy of the original\u00a0“Truth and Falsehood”<\/a> which is a part of The Wellington Memorial<\/a> which we saw at St. Paul’s Cathedral<\/a>\u00a0several days ago. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The fashion and jewelry exhibits\u00a0at the Victoria Albert were equally as touching, but for different reasons. Coming from a background in feminism, I was disappointed in those women who conformed to societal ideals of beauty – women who cinched their waists and bustled their butts, weighing themselves down with heavy jewelry, changing and shifting and molding themselves to ‘fit,’ quite literally, into the beauty myth<\/a>. \u00a0One display featuring a bustle and the wooden innards of a hoopskirt\u00a0were reminiscent of a cage. And would it really be so far from the truth if it were?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Another exhibit which really hit me was photography. A great little exhibit, though I do wish it were larger. I thought that all of the works were quite good, though I connected on a deeper level with just two prints. The first piece was strikingly different. The artist worked with the principles of light and photography and used the sun to burn a simple design into the photo paper. I didn’t quite understand the process by which the piece was created\u00a0but that’s the beauty of art, isn’t it? You don’t always have to understand it, or at least understand it as the artist does. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One piece that I definitely took a bit of “viewer’s license” to form my own\u00a0interpretation was a photograph of a beautiful black model in a traditional Georgian dress and wig – both stark white. In her delicate hand she held a large diamond, perfectly cut and gleaming. Her head tilted towards the diamond in her hand, yet her eyes remained fixed intently on the camera. I thought that this piece, out of all the pieces of artwork I have seen at any exhibit thus far, had the most to say. It powerfully conveyed, by capturing\u00a0 just a single moment\u00a0in time, hundreds of years of British imperialism and the pain it caused the imperialized.\u00a0The Africans and West Indians were brought to\u00a0perhaps not-so-‘Great’ Britain and taught that being ripped from their homelands like so many weeds was a privilege. They drowned\u00a0the\u00a0enslaved\u00a0in western culture,\u00a0which is represented by the model wearing the white<\/span><\/em> (this was surely no mistake) Georgian garb, and meanwhile robbed their homelands of natural resources – such as diamonds and gold – for their own profit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 “Has imperialism, has slavery, really ended?” one must ask him or herself when one considers that there are still related issues in today’s society.\u00a0The answer should become glaringly apparent when one considers Westerners’ continued thirst for diamonds. Though our presence in the diamond mines of Africa, in places like Sierra Leone, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, \u00a0may not be physical, our\u00a0socially-sculpted ideologies surrounding the institution of marriage perpetuates these issues, and exacerbates the problems surrounding blood diamonds<\/a>.\u00a0So, for all you ladies out there: next time you stare doe-eyed into a Zales’ display window and exclaim in “I can’t wait to get married!” think twice about what societal forces and social constructions may be at work when you consider the\u00a0“necessity” of an engagement ring. And the next time you look at a piece of art, everyone, look a little deeper and listen a little closer\u00a0to what the piece may be trying to say.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"London\u00a0 \"London\u00a0 \"London<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"London\u00a0 \"London\u00a0\u00a0\"London<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No museum\u00a0 has affected me as viscerally as\u00a0The Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. Immediately upon entering the museum I was struck by the sight of life-sized Rodin sculptures of the human body that were raised above eye level, which created, for me, a sense of the insignificance of the appreciator, and likewise, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[736,77],"tags":[1179,984,1077,1048,1177,1178,1180,1045],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anya","category-museums","tag-blood-diamonds","tag-fashion","tag-feminism","tag-photography","tag-sculpture","tag-the-white-mans-burden","tag-the-beauty-myth","tag-the-victoria-and-albert-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}