London 2018: Notting Hill - Holland Park, Design Museum, Portobello Road Market

It seems like the districts surrounding Hyde Park and Kensington Palace are all affluent areas, including Bayswater to the north, Mayfair and Marylebone to the East and Belgravia, Chelsea and Kensington to the south.  This trend continues with Notting Hill, found on the west side of Hyde Park and also known as the setting for the 1999 romantic comedy of the same name starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.  From our rental apartment in Earls Court, it is a 6km walk directly north to get to Notting Hill, where we planned to visit the famous Portobello Road Market, with stops at Holland Park and the Design Museum along the way.  Holland Park is a 54 acre public park which was once part of the estate of Lord Holland, whose sculpture is prominently on display.  It includes the east wing and some ruins of Holland House, a Japanese (Kyoto) garden as well as other formal gardens, an orangery, a wilderness area, sports fields including tennis courts, cricket fields and a children’s play area.  The park is surrounded by a main street called Holland Park Avenue where many high-end restaurants, shops and spas can be found, as well as 3 smaller residential streets.  Confusingly, two of these streets are also called Holland Park, where rows of large Victorian townhouses can be found surrounded by mature trees.  The third is called Holland Park Mews, containing rows of smaller carriage houses, but these Mews seem much more upscale than some of the ones we have seen in other parts of London.

The London Design Museum focuses on graphics, product and industrial, fashion and architectural design.  A free exhibit called “Designer Maker User” offers an introduction to the history of contemporary design.  A rotating sign alternately displays the words “DESIGNER”, “MAKER” and “USER”, representing the three partners in the design process.  The first display at the entrance of the exhibit is called the “crowd-sourced wall” which consists of around 200 items from 25 countries which were suggested by the public to be items important to their daily lives.  Items found on this wall include the London underground sign, a bicycle, a jar of marmite, a hot water bottle, rotary phones, Levi jeans and more. Some of the interesting items in this exhibit included a Che Guevera watch designed and manufactured by Swatch (1995), a radio watch manufactured by Sinclair Research, the prototype of tap-able acrylic finger nails that could be used as an Oyster Card transit payment system (2015), and the 12-inch Keraclonic Sphere TV (1970) designed Keracolor.

Other design items included the Tritensil “Spork” (2014), a contemporary version of a portmanteau of a spoon and a fork, as well as a “grunge-chic” Mickey and Minnie Mouse top (1978) by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren that subversively depicts the iconic animated characters in a provocative pose.  The lightweight, lipstick-red “Valentine” typewriter manufactured by Olivetti is positioned in front of various poster designs.  The e-NABLE Raptor Reloaded prosthetic hand (2013-15) provide artificial hands for growing children, produced using a 3-D printer.  Various clock designs included the multi-coloured “Ball” wall clock (1947), the “Font” clock (2007) that displays the time and date in 12 different fonts and a “Formosa” perpetual calendar (1962).  The “Enorme” telephone (1986) by Ettore Sottsass has a playful shape and bold use of colour.

A very fun interactive application demonstrates Laver’s Law, conceived by fashion historian James Laver in 1937.  He theorizes that fashions of the distant past are admired as charming before being considered beautiful.  But trends of recent past are viewed as ridiculous, then amusing and eventually quaint.  Accordingly, we dislike the clothes that we wore a few years ago but become nostalgic about “vintage” clothing worn by our parents or grandparents.   A digital application based on Laver’s law offers visitors the opportunities to “try on” fashion trends from different centuries and decades.  You select the era from a keypad and pose in front of a screen that acts as a mirror with the instructions to place your hands on your hips.  The application superimposes the selected fashion on top of your body and after providing your email, it sends you a photo of what you look like “wearing” that fashion.  I think there is some validity to Laver’s Law since I liked the clothes from older eras much better than the silly harem outfit or tacky track suit from more recent years.  Another thing that I learned from this experiment was that my waist is way too wide to fit into some of these outfits from years gone by.  I would need to be strapped in like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind!

One of the two ticketed special exhibits on at the Design Museum featured the creations of Tunisian-born couturier and shoe designer Alzzadine Alaia.  While we chose not to buy tickets for this exhibit, we did get a feel for his works since there were two examples of his haute couture designs in the lobby of the museum, as well as a series of photographs taken during his show at the Paris Galleria in 2013.  Alaia creates technically complex, made-to-order clothes by draping fabrics over his models and cuts his own patterns.  One of his more unusual designs pictured was the “crocodile jacket”, aptly named for the scales and pointy tail forming the back of the jacket.

The special exhibit that we actually came to the Design Museum specifically to see was called “Hope to Nope – Graphics and Politics (2008-2018).”  The general theme of the exhibit illustrates how graphic design has shaped political messages in the past decade, in the form of posters, protest symbols and internet memes.   In many ways graphic messages have challenged, altered and influenced key political moments including the latest American election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The show is divided up into three sections—Power, Protest and Personality.  Each section demonstrates how graphic design played a pivotal role in dictating and reacting to major political moments, including the Global Financial Crisis, Gay Rights, ISIS threats, Brexit and Occupy Wall Street.  The time span of the exhibition is not coincidental and references directly to the title of the show.  The years of Barack Obama’s presidency in the United States between 2008-2015 were seen as times of hope, poignantly symbolized by Shepard Fairey’s iconic red, white and blue “Hope” image of Obama.  The climate of the country changed dramatically in 2016 when the divisive populist Donald Trump was elected.  Fairey encouraged Obama supporters to create parodies of his “Hope” meme, using templates and social media filters, substituting other faces and words.  The results are hilarious, including the words “Nope” and “Grope” for Trump.  An image of Sarah Palin was also created with the word “Nope” while George Bush was rendered with “Dope” (although Dope would have worked for Palin also).  The one that I found most amusing and out of the blue was an image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un with the label “Food”, while the appropriateness of the word "Truth" for Wikileaks secrets revealer Edward Snowden might be a matter of opinion.

The “Power” section demonstrates how graphic design can be used to assert or subvert authority.  The logo created for Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign identity played on the first letter of her name.  It consisted of the image of an “H” with an arrow through the middle.  Meant to look fresh and forward-thinking, the logo drew mockery with claims that she plagiarized the symbol from the FedEx sign, which has a hidden arrow between the “E” and the “x”.  Trump’s red cap with the slogan of “Make America Great Again” was more effective to the disgruntled part of the country that wanted change, as it gave him the image of the “everyman” candidate.  In the 2016 Spanish election, the left-wing, anti-austerity political party Podemos produced their manifesto in the style of an IKEA catalogue featuring its candidates in domestic settings.  This “culture jamming” or subversion of iconic brand identity was a strategy to connect and identify with the younger population of electorates.  Graphic design played a large part in the jockeying for position on both sides of the BREXIT debate.  The “Stay” side played with the word “IN” which was also the last two letters of the word “REMAIN”, and made visual reference to the UK flag.  A European magazine targeted the “LEAVE” side with inflammatory, propaganda-laced headlines including “Bloody Idiot” and “May Day” featuring Theresa May’s face.  One cartoon shows the shark from the movie Jaws about to devour the swimming Theresa May while she quips “I think we’re going to need a bigger minority.  As a counter-punch for the “Leave” side, JD Wetherspoon, owner of a chain of pubs, distributed 200,000 beer place mats to all his pubs with a post-Brexit manifesto written on it.  Statements on the manifesto included eliminating import taxes on food items and eliminating payments to the European Union (EU).

Two more graphic designs illustrate the fight for public opinion that occurred during the lead-up to the BREXIT vote.  Anglo-French designer Sarah Boris made a UK Union Jack flag using packaging tape with “Fragile” on it, making a visually impactful statement of the precariousness of the relationship between the UK and the EU. The “Leave” side made a spoof of the Bayeux Tapestry which depicts the Normans defeating the English in 1066.  The new version depicts UK’s Brexit victory over the EU, echoing the original in style and imagery.  The “Destination Pride Data Visualisation” graph, which emulates the “Gay Pride” flag, was developed to help the LGBTQ community travel more safely around the world by indicating the laws and attitudes of 195 countries and 2000 cities with respect to social rights and liberties.  The coloured bars measured Marriage Equality, Sexual Activity Laws, Gender Identification Protection, Anti-Discrimination Laws, Civil Rights and Liberties and Social Media Sentiment.  The display provides some sample charts for the U.K, Honduras, Jamaica, Syria, Sweden, and Singapore.  The “NEWBORN” monument is a prize-winning typographical structure that commemorates Kosovan independence from Serbia in 2008.  Initially made in 2013 with yellow lettering symbolizing hope, the sign was repainted with the flags of all the countries that recognized Kosovan independence.  In 2017, the “N” and the “W” of the sign were laid flat and along with more letters painted on the ground, formed the phrase “No Walls”, which referred both to Syria and to Donald Trump’s desire for a wall along the US-Mexican border.  A recreation of the “N” from the monument was shown in the exhibit.

The second section of the exhibit dealt with “Protest”, featuring campaigns against governments, corporations, and other organizations from around the world.  Some of the most provocative as well as evocative examples of propaganda in graphic design are found here.  The global Occupy Movement, which started in the Wall Street Financial District in New York,  protests against economic injustice and disproportionate political influence by banks and major corporations, especially during the Global Financial Crisis.  Posters and imagery allude to the assertion of the movement that 1% of the population controls all the wealth and power while the remaining 99% are economically and socially repressed.  The activists in the 2011 “Occupy George” campaign hand-stamped red informational graphics on bank notes with graphs and slogans highlighting the income distribution of the 1% vs the 99%, and a link to their website occupygeorge.com.  The group made sure that they did not cover any of the currency’s security features, thus ensuring that the bills were still considered to be legal tender.  In protest of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2013 banning of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”, which effectively silenced the LGBT community, a series of Russian Pride Propaganda posters (probably created by Western supporters) co-opted traditional Soviet-era Socialist imagery and rendered them with the Gay Pride flag.  Memes suggesting Putin is secretly gay appeared including ones depicting him in front of a Pride flag while wearing heavy “gay clown” makeup.  The example from Amsterdam shown in this exhibit is more subdued but still shows Putin wearing rouge, eyeshadow and lipstick, and the caption in Russian translates to “Tsarina Putin”.  In 2017, Bosnian-born designer Mirko Ilic’s “Tolerance” poster exhibit commissioned illustrators from around the world to create works that incorporated the theme.  The example on display in the Hope to Nope show was Israeli David Tartakover’s self portrait wearing bright red lipstick, which was in direct reference to the “Gay Clown Putin” memes.  The world “Tolerence” is written in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

The Umbrella Revolution of 2014 protested against China’s restrictions on a free election in Hong Kong, resulting in mass sit-ins by tens of thousands of citizens.  Used to shield the protesters against the sun as well as from police tear gas, umbrellas became a symbol of the movement.  The 2015/16 “Chega de Pagar o Pato” (meaning “I will not pay the duck”) protest in Brazil used the iconic symbol of the yellow rubber ducky to decry government corruption and excessive tax rises.  The movement called for the ousting of President Dila Rousseff, who was indeed impeached in 2016.   On June 14, 2017, a fire in the West London Grenfell Tower resulted in the deaths of 71 people.  The fire spread quickly due to the use of flammable materials for external building renovations, a result of either incompetence or corruption.  Widespread anger arose due to the lack of response from government authorities when called upon for justice for the victims, rehousing for the displaced and remedies for the fire-safety hazards of the building.  Local artists showed solidarity with the residents through graffiti, murals, artwork and a 24Hearts community project, requesting people to make one heart for each floor in the tower.  As further protest, inspired by the Oscar-winning movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the action group Justice4Grenfell hired three billboard vans to tour London with the messages “71 Dead”, “And Still No Arrests?”, “How Come?”.

Other protest designs include a poster for gun control and several poignant drawings by the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo following the mass shooting in 2015 that killed 12 people and injured 11.  The images were each variations of the mantra that “The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword”.  North Korea’s propaganda campaign uses stylized, Russian-inspired patriotic posters with depictions of industrial, technological and cultural progress in its own country, while issuing anti-American stamps that use Hollywood movie narratives to show brave North Koreans battling and defeating their U.S. enemies.  Images of shredded American flags dominate in these stamps that are produced both for domestic use and to sell as collector items.  South Korea also participates in these propaganda wars.  A former North Korean state propaganda artist who escaped to South Korea is now satirically repurposing his earlier works and adding symbols of peace to them.  South Korean activists have sent helium balloons over the border to North Korea with messages including “Kim Jong-Il, aren’t you afraid of the truth?”.  The balloons carry sacks of leaflets about Western life, USB sticks containing Western film and flyers critiquing North Korea’s authoritarian regime.

Two contrasting depictions of Donald Trump can be found in this section.  A pair of similarly themed anti-Trump designs subtly (or not so subtly) compare him to Hitler and Nazi Germany. Created by the firm Design is Play, the letter “T” for Trump is positioned in gold on a black background in such a way that when you look at the space between the “T”s, you can see a swastika.  An even more overt reference to the swastika was created by artist Mike Mitchell, who created a digital image that rotates “45” (Trump being the 45th president of the United States) into the swastika with just a few short movements.  The message is strikingly clear.  By contrast, a “pro-Trump” poster titled “Rogue Won” re-imagines the poster for the Star Wars movie “Rogue One” and was released shortly after Donald Trump’s election victory.  The street artist Sabo depicts a heroic-looking Trump replacing the heroine Jyn Erso’s (played by Felicity Jones) spot on the poster, with his cronies including Steve Bannon and Ann Coulter depicted in the supporting roles.  Hillary Clinton appears as the shadowy villain in the top right corner, in place of Darth Vader.  British illustrator and provocateur Mr Bingo created a hilarious tea towel highlighting the bitter generational divide between the youth who want to remain in the European Union and the older population who overwhelmingly voted for BREXIT.  The tea towel depicts faces of old people along with the caption “People Who Voted For BREXIT Who Are Now Dead”.

Corporate protest came in the form of posters created by an International art collective with the clever name of “Brandalism”, a portmanteau that combines the terms Brand and Vandalism.  The group replaces actual advertisements with subversive messages of resistance against corporate control.  For example, the Volkswagen “Drive cleaner” ad was updated to add the phrase “Or just pretend to” in reference to the emissions scandal where six executives were charged for modifying the emissions outputs of their vehicles to make them appear to meet regulatory testing standards.  This concept of “Brandalism” has been used by other activists against corporations.  Greenpeace environmentalists created plastic bottles that looked like “Coke” in terms of shape, size, colour, lettering and font, but actually read “Choke”, in its “Don’t Let Coke Choke Our Oceans” campaign against plastic pollution.  The group “Space Hijackers” protested the London 2012 Olympics and its corporate tie-ins for encroaching upon public spaces by making a spoof of an Olympics T-shirt, which instead read “Official Protester”.  When BP Oil experienced an oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico, protesters marched in front of a BP-sponsored Shakespeare Festival wearing a green and yellow, folded paper ruff made to look like BP’s logo.  The ruff was dipped in black oil and protesters encouraged patrons to rip the BP logo from their programs.  A Black Lives Matters (BLM) quilt features the group’s logo and a raised fist, the symbol of the fight against white oppression of blacks, sits in contrast to  “Blue Lives Matter” version of an American flag in black, white and a blue stripe that highlights the risks and harassment faced by police officers and commemorates officers killed in the line of duty.

The third and final section of the Hope to Nope exhibit dealt with “Personalities” and of course, the major focus was on the outrageous and divisive nature of US President Donald Trump.  An entire wall of covers of magazines from around the world have featured caricatures of Trump, highlighting his distinctive “hair flip”, orange-tinged tanned face and trademark red tie.  The sentiments are quite similar as they depict Trump as a wrecking ball, tidal wave, ball of fire, Frankenstein-esque monster, Ku-Klux-Klan member, a shark under water, and more.  Many images depict his mouth wide open in mid rant.  Some of the covers morph Trump with images of Putin, Kim Jong-Un or Hillary Clinton.   Surprisingly, in contrast to all their other covers, there was one “Time Magazine” cover that seemed to portray Trump in a positive light.  This cover was displayed at several of his golf courses.  He is depicted in a dignified pose with headlines including “The Apprentice is a television smash”, and “Trump is hitting on all fronts .. even TV!”.  As it turns out, the Washington Post debunked this cover as a forgery created by Pentagram Design Consultants as a vanity project for Trump.  How egotistical and hypocritical of the man who so often cries “Fake News!”.

Other political personalities highlighted in the exhibit included Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party in U.K.’s 2017 general election.  To gain youth support, he copied the iconic Nike swoosh in his campaign imagery which led to a copyright infringement court injunction from the sports company.  Usually known as a “scruffy” politician, attempts were made to improve Corbyn’s image by dressing him in a power suit and putting him on the cover of British GQ magazine.  The airbrushed images drew mixed responses and some backlash.  The much maligned U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is featured in several unflattering caricatures by cartoonist Chris Riddell including ones about BREXIT where her opponent Boris Johnson doesn’t fare much better.  The cover of an anthology of comics dedicated to the rise to power of Jeremy Corbyn shows him about to slay “Maydusa” (Theresa May depicted as mythical Greek monster Medusa with the snakes in her hair).  A very funny work shows news images of German Chancellor Angela Merkel dressed in outfits that span a colour spectrum of 90 tones.  The images are laid out in a “Pantone” colour system used by graphic designers to specify print colours, and also looks like a series of paint chips.

Pulsar is an audience intelligence firm that uses a research team to scour the social media listening platforms to gather data on a given topic and then generates data visualizations in the form of charts and graphs to provide analysis and insight.  The Design Museum partnered with Pulsar to monitor the social media conversations of five political leaders including U.K.’s Theresa May, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.  One of Pulsar's line graphs map the number of Twitter mentions of each politician over a period of months from March 2017 through February 2018, with text explaining the political events that led to occasional spikes in traffic, such as when Macron, May and Merkle won their respective elections.

Pie Charts for each global politician track the words most associated with them.  The top chart focused on personality traits and it was interesting to see that both May and Merkel scored highest on the word “weakness” although for different reasons.  May was seen to be ineffective in navigating the road to Brexit while Merkel was seen to be weak on her immigration policies.  Macron’s most popular word was “youthfulness”, although it was debatable whether that was considered a good (new blood, change) or bad (inexperience) trait.  The major word or trait attributed to Putin was “corruption” .. enough said?

The Hope to Nope: Graphic and Politics exhibit at the London Design Museum was one of the most fascinating and informative shows that I’ve ever been to.  With over 160 objects and installations, there was so much information to disseminate that we didn’t have enough time to give every piece the attention that it deserved.  In many cases, I just took a photo of the object and associated explanation and did not actually read and understand what I was looking at until writing this blog.  So it was like seeing the exhibit all over again.  The best attraction in the exhibit was saved for last.  It was the “All-seeing Trump “Mis”Fortune Telling Machine”, modeled after the old carnival gypsy fortune telling machines (like “Zoltar” in the movie “Big”).  This one features a creepy, evil-red-eyed Trump automaton standing in front of a crystal ball with a white bird wearing a red "Make America Great" cap perched on his shoulder.

When you press the red button, the automaton comes to life and speaks in a voice eerily like the actual Donald Trump, spouting the type of racist, misogynistic or idiotic statements that the he is known for, and taking them to the next level of absurdness.  Eight different “misfortunes” promise that if Trump is elected president, he will deliver “a terrific nuclear war”, “racial profiling, recession,  so many guns that you will get tired of shooting”, “such an incredible wall” and more.  It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frighteningly on point.

 *Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

A couple of months after we returned home from our trip, we read in the New York Times that the Design Museum was being protested against by about 20 artists who had provided works for the Hope to Nope exhibit. Given that many of their works promoted peace and arms reduction, the artists disapproved of the institution’s hosting of an event for Leonardo, an aerospace, defence and arms producing company and showed up at the museum to remove their works.  The show continued for another month with a sign reading “This artwork was removed at the request of the lender who objected to …” in place of the 29 missing works.  Free admission to the show was granted during this period.  This strange twist to the end of this exhibit’s run was such a surreal example of “Life imitating art imitating life”.

Because we were mostly visiting “off the beaten path” locations on this trip, and were traveling in the month of May ahead of the summer tourist season, we had so far not endured any large crowds.  This all changed when we hit the Portobello Road Market on the busy Saturday morning market day.  One of the highlights of Notting Hill, the Portobello Road Market is one of London’s best known markets, especially on Saturdays when a large antiques/ bric-a-brac market is open, in addition to the fruits and vegetables, food stalls, clothing and second-hand goods markets that are open the rest of the week.  As soon as we hit the area, we were sucked into a huge throng of shoppers so thick that we often had to push our way through to continue down the road.

Once again, my husband Rich was able to indulge his passion for vintage watches and clocks, as there were multiple antiques and jewelry dealers that stocked items that interested him.  His favourite discovery was the set of miniature capsule-enclosed Movado Emerto travel clocks (circa 1930-50s) that pull apart to review the clock face, and compresses together into its own storage case.  Measuring less than 2 inches closed and less than 3 inches open, the act of opening these mini clocks also winds them.  Ric also admired the driver’s watch (circa 1970) with the tilted dial that is made to sit on an angle on the side of your wrist so that it is facing you while you are driving with your watch arm holding the steering wheel.  I liked the fact that you could find stores selling Prada bags, Alexander McQueen dresses and Camilla Elphick “Royal Flush” designer sandals (decorated with playing cards!) in the same market as Street Art t-shirts with knock-off Banksy prints on them.

Other fun sightings at the Portobello Road Market included yet another version of a foursome crossing the Abbey Road Zebra walk that we visited during our Beatles walking tour.  This time it was the cartoon Simpsons family consisting of Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa.  There were some cool murals including one of the Michelin Tire Man (Bibendum) that we were immersed in when we had lunch at the Bibendum Oyster Bar in the Michelin House.   We also spotted the blue heritage sign marking the home of novelist George Orwell, who wrote the iconic books “Animal Farm” and “1984”.  Towards the northern end of Portobello Road were the hot food stalls offering choices from around the world such as curry, paella, fish and chips, bratwurst and more.  We were tempted by the big vats of Halal chicken based paella and seafood based paella and bought a mixture of the two to take home for dinner.  As a quick snack, we bought a meatball wrap and ate it right there on the spot.  This was a nice way to end a long day. The Portobello Market was an entertaining place to visit once, but it was a bit too crowded for my taste.