The new London Museum, opening in November, has made its founding gesture: The Clash's destroyed bass guitar anchors seven million objects in its opening collection. A smashed instrument, violence made artifact, property damage elevated to cultural patrimony. The institution is basically announcing its thesis with its first object: destruction is also creation, and London's history includes the people who broke things on purpose.
What the Punk Object Does to Museum Logic
Traditional museum acquisition logic runs toward preservation, completeness, pristine condition. A bass guitar smashed by Paul Simonon in 1979 and then kept is not a preserved object. It is a document of a specific kind of refusal. Putting it at the center of a civic institution inverts the usual relationship between the museum and its holdings. The object is not there despite its damage. It is there because of it. This is the same logic that makes Julie Mehretu's civic political turn, running for Congress while maintaining an art practice, legible: the institution and the rupture of the institution are now the same gesture.
Archive as Political Act
Rosalie Favell's work, profiled in Hyperallergic this week, operates in a similar register. Favell came out as a lesbian before she came out as an Indigenous woman, and her art practice is built on recovering and recontextualizing images that institutional archives either ignored or actively suppressed. The London Museum's choice of the Simonon bass is a small version of the same argument: what you choose to keep, and how you frame the keeping, is a political act that shapes what the city understands itself to have been. David Senior's work at SFMOMA's library articulates exactly this: the librarian as an artist who curates what gets to count as memory.