Kylie - The Exhibition

I’ve always found the debate over high and low culture slightly stale and irrelevant. Contrived stand offs between Bob Dylan and Beethoven bore the pants off me. Besides, I’ve swallowed enough post structuralist critiques of elitist hierarchies of value to know that popular culture is a valid subject for intellectual reflection. Plus, Put Yourself In My Place is, like, one of my favourite songs ever. So the debate about whether the V&A should put on a show about Kylie Minogue struck me at first as a non-issue, pandering to the worst kind of lazy middlebrow snobbery. Then I went to the exhibition...

Kylie: The Exhibition consists of a display of stage outfits and costumes, ranging from the mechanic’s overalls she wore in Neighbours to the bizarre Dolce and Gabbana designs of her current Showgirl Homecoming tour. Alongside these are displayed Kylie’s record covers, tour artefacts, videos, a re-creation of her dressing room and a vending machine of Kylie endorsed mineral water.

Aside from a number of text panels, there’s little commentary or interpretation and the objects are displayed in a flatly literal manner. Such labelling as there is makes a pretty lame and unconvincing case for why Kylie Minogue’s costumes should be in the V&A in the first place. Words like ‘icon’ and ‘phenomenon’ are bandied about but these terms are now so lazily over deployed as to be almost meaningless and their use here seems particularly half-hearted and pointless. The costs and logistics of putting on Kylie’s tours are listed but not contrasted with anything that might make them make more interesting or compelling or anything other than blandly impressive. Her dressing room is re-created but not to make a point, just to fill up some space. The labelling for this reaches a zenith of banality. It is, we are told; “…very special, a home away from home”. Even better than this is the information that: “..road cases are the best way to transport her extensive wardrobe”. Gosh.

The exhibition has been bought in from Australia where it was originally shown at The Arts Centre, Melbourne. It comes across as shallow hagiography without even the spitefulness of heat!, or the inadvertent vileness of Hello. It is, rather, the authorised biography.
Like her latest persona, Kylie: The Exhibition has a camp “Darling! You look fabulous” quality. This is only heightened by the cod surrealism of her Showgirls tour and her recent entry into the tragic diva hall of fame by becoming officially A Survivor. But the show achieves Susan Sontag’s definition of campness as an attempt at seriousness that fails. It wants to be culturally relevant and daringly iconoclastic, but lacks the courage or savvy to know how. It is also shamelessly sycophantic and utterly without critical reflection.

This is not about pop culture’s place in the museum. The V&A is full of pop culture already after all, and has a distinguished history of putting on exhibitions about costume and design. I didn’t dislike this show because I thought it too lowbrow, or too commercial or too vulgar. I disliked it because it was dull and po-faced and vaguely moronic. There is a thoroughly bathetic moment at the end when as you leave, you find yourself inadvertently wandering into the Medieval rooms of the V&A. From Kylie’s gold hotpants to Trajan’s column in a few steps. It’s not a flattering comparison.

Just before leaving, there is one more tribute to Kylie: a wall on which you can stick little heart shaped personal tributes. Thus in a faintly sinister way, you’re not even allowed express anything but love for Kylie. Alongside sycophantic quotes from the likes of Manolo Blahnik, Peter Huntley of the V&A has given us the benefit of his insight: “Kylie’s fun to sing along to.” Thanks Peter.

All The Chickens On The Kingsland Road

Coming Soon!

Look out for: All The Chickens On The Kingsland Road - a photographic survey of take aways from Shoreditch to Stoke Newington.

Also coming up:

Kylie Minogue at the V&A, (opens on February 8th). Sadly, rather than catch Kylie's latest Showgirl comeback tour, I'm reviewing the exhibition instead.

I've Been Around The World. This is gonna be an untitled, un-captioned, photographic record of those forlorn, pompous, negligable, overblown bits of art that litter the world's public spaces.

Meanwhile, the recent death of the inventor of instant noodles has moved me to write in praise of that most maligned of snacks; the Pot Noodle. Read Modernism: A Potted History......

Modernism: A Potted History

In Memoriam: Momoluku Ando (March 5th 1910 - January 5th 2007)

Momoluku Ando - who died at the beginning of January this year - bequeathed the world one of its most incredible products: the Pot Noodle. Could there be a better icon of mass-produced, instant, transportable, lightweight, efficient, international modernity than the Pot Noodle? Forget the Futurist’s Cook Book, this is food as Modernists dreamt the world could be.

Despite its staggering success the Pot Noodle occupies a problematic place in our food culture. In fact, for most people, it is doubtful whether they would actually class it as a food at all. Pot Noodle is most definitely a PRODUCT and, these days food's cultural value lies in its claims to naturalness. Current attitudes to food mirror our mixed up attitude to modernity in general. Food consumption is currently subject to more sentimentalism, pseudo-regionalism and sheer perversity than even architecture. It is no coincidence that Prince Charles’ twin areas of industry over the last twenty years have been in these two fields. His combination of a misty eyed veneration of olde England, deep political conservatism, sentimental love of the land and anti-scientific belief systems have given us both Poundbury and Duchy Originals: his recently built village and organic food range respectively.

If Duchy Originals hail from the same source as Poundbury then where do Pot Noodles come from? Tokyo? Milton Keynes? Well, Wales actually but like Milton Keynes they are derided and denigrated by all right thinking people, symbolic of a wasteful, over packaged, over sanitised, lazy and nutritionally under-nourished culture, removed from food production, lost to the land, indifferent to the changing seasons. They are the ultimate enemy of the Slow Food movement, the Room 101 of TV chefs. Duchy Originals are self-consciously conservative, evoking images of localised cottage farming industry. Organic, authentic and original. The associations with monarchy may rankle but the Duchy bacon and biscuits on our supermarket shelves are a favourite of urban foodies. And this is another paradox of our complex culture. Recently, our retail landscape has inverted itself. Gentrified parts of East London are now full of specialist cheese emporiums, retro sweet shops and down to earth farmers markets. Urbanites, decked in Japanese denim and plugged into Californian software, amble about picking the greenfly off Bramlies and the mud off Maris Pipers. Farmer’s stalls fill up vacant plots of inner London like a cross between Archigram’s Instant City and the Archers. It’s like….well, actually it’s so complicated, so perversely tortuous in its lack of logic that it’s hard to say what it's like. Who would have thought the city would end up looking like this? Certainly not the Futurists and, probably, not the inventor of Pot Noodles either. Meanwhile, out in the sticks, everyone is off to Tesco.

In a land of Nigel and Nigella, modern convenience food appears doomed. Except it isn’t. Pot Noodle's manufacturer's Unilever sell 4 Pot Noodles every second. Their slick and funny marketing campaign plays relentlessly on the negative connotations of Pot Noodles, constantly referring to its unnaturalness and slobby lack of sophistication. They recently brought out a super hot curry version called Bombay Bad Boy and a more upmarket one called Posh Noodle. And just look at that Bombay Bad Boy packing. It’s black with flames on it. When did anyone try and sell food in packaging that looked like a hot rod? No tasteful use of tartan, no retro packaging, no “I’m home made, I must be good for you” schtick. Pot Noodle flaunts its in-authenticity, it's status as a product, something made in a factory and boxed in its millions. It's latest advertising campaign pokes yet more fun at our longing for natural products by suggesting that the noodles are mined in Wales.

A vegetarian friend of mine at University existed for some time solely on Chicken Pot Noodles. He did this because Chicken Pot Noodles were: A, amazingly cheap and; B, contained absolutely no chicken. Momoluku Ando’s product got my friend through some difficult times. Now, he probably has nothing to with it and gets his vegetables delivered by Able & Cole. This, though, is our contemporary version of modernity. This is where we went in the century of Modernism that Ando lived through. A society complex enough to embrace the giddying effects of digital technology and to also want its vegetables seasonal and with the mud still on. And, to eat 175 million Pot Noodles a year on the sly.