Give & Take is an innovative exhibition juxtaposing contemporary works of art with the V&A's historic collections, creating visual dialogues between the past and the present.
 Hans Haacke
(b. Germany, 1936. Since 1965, lives and works in New York.)
Haacke's work often traces the histories of cultural institutions, the formation of their collections and also their relations with funders - whether governmental, corporate or private. Thus a number of his projects, such as Mixed Messages, consider critically the institution of the Museum.
In 1999 Haacke accepted an invitation from the Trustees and Directors of both the V&A and the Serpentine to create an installation selected from the Museum's collections and presented at the Gallery. He was given unprecedented access to the Museum and its store and the collection of the Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green.
Haacke's choices were made without adhering to the conventions that inform the Museum's classification of these objects. While there is no single "meaning" ascribed by the artist to Mixed Messages, there are number of themes that may be perceived throughout the installation. Evolving representations of Britishness are juxtaposed with stereotypical images of "foreigners" and the colonised. Europeans abroad are seen through their own lens as well as that of the "others" with whom they may interacted. Threading its way through the exhibition is the erotic power of dominance - one gender, class, race or faith over another.
But if there is a primary leitmotiv in Mixed Messages, however, it is the deceptiveness of objects and images, that what we see may not indeed be what we see, or what lies beneath what is before us. Within the first space of his installation Haacke turns on its head the old adage "the camera doesn't lie", demonstrating how images contain layers that, when peeled like an onion, expand, contract and contradict one another. A photograph by the American artist Cindy Sherman parodies a film still, the artist dressed as an actress who, in turn, impersonates a female character. Similarly, in a single vitrine in another gallery, a representation of a black boy is carved in white marble creating confusion between the colour of the material and the subject's distinctly African features. Another doll has interchangeable limbs, some black, others white, creating a hybrid ethnicity. In this context, objects are perceived as more surreal than those weird combinations created in the Surrealist game of the exquisite corpse. But most surreal of all are museums where deadly serious games of "mixed messages" are always being played and where we, as viewers, are urged to take part as delighted, but also, warily critical participants.
 Ken Aptekar (Born US, lives and works in Paris and New York)
Q&A, V&A, 2000 (Installation commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery for Give & Take)
Ken Aptekar's installation, based on paintings in the V&A's collections, is on view in the Henry Cole Wing, Level 4.
Ken Aptekar appropriates - borrows - imagery from historic works of art to form the basis of his paintings. He transforms the original images by, for example, reducing them to fragments or depicting them in brown or grey tones. Aptekar's paintings also include his texts, which are derived from discussions with invited museum visitors in response to selected paintings. The edited responses, which often reveal deeply personal aspects about the participants' identities, are sandblasted onto glass panels, which are bolted to the surface of the paintings. In this way the verbal and visual responses of both viewer and artist are combined.
For Q&A, V&A, Aptekar organised group discussion sessions with individuals reflecting the diversity of the V&A's visitors, for example Art School graduates and Afro-Caribbean Senior Citizens. The paintings discussed were selected by the artist from the paintings usually on display in the Henry Cole Wing, such as Anthony Devis's The Duet, together with other paintings from the collection.
 Xu Bing (Born China, lives and works in New York)
Xu Bing's banner, installed over the entrance on the V&A's Cromwell Road facade, was originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to hang on its own facade. Xu Bing's work incorporates lettering from the New English Calligraphy, a sign system invented by the artist that renders the English alphabet in what may, to a Western eye, look like Chinese characters. Xu Bing's hybrid language bears comparison to the objects in Gallery 47e, the Chinese Export Gallery. These objects, blending European and Chinese tastes, were often made to order for the consumption of Westerners.
Although Xu Bing's banner is written in the square-format and schematic picture-writing of Chinese calligraphy, we can in fact make out the English text 'ART FOR THE PEOPLE'. This text is a popularisation of Mao Zedong's position regarding art and society. By presenting this quotation in his own 'language', Xu Bing merges two cultures and two differing political systems - Communism and Capitalism.
These sentiments echo the views of Henry Cole, founding director of the V&A, whose house faces the Cromwell Road Entrance of the V&A. Cole believed staunchly in the educational function of the museum and insisted that all members of the public should have access to its collections. Under his tenure, the V&A instituted a number of policies and facilities enabling working families to visit the museum, most notably gas-lit extended evening hours. He also believed that museums should be publicly funded, not a popular view in his time.
 Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska (Born UK and Poland respectively, live and work in London)
In recent years Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have developed a number of projects with museum collections, retail stores, art galleries and places of education; all of which play a central role in structuring the exchange of values between people and objects. Rather than conceiving an artwork that is taken to a designated space of display - conventionally an art gallery - Cummings and Lewandowska are interested in developing a range of practices relevant to the context of a particular project.
Use Value is a sound installation created specifically for the Ceramics Galleries (Level D), which is also audible in the Main Entrance, of the V&A. The displays in these galleries focus on craftsmanship, design and the material from which the objects were fabricated. Filtered through the collection are audio recordings made by the artists of various locations, including the chatter of the restaurant as diners eat, or the clamour as school children eat their lunch, the sounds of washing-up, punctuated by the crash of an object accidentally dropped. The invitation for the visitor is to imagine the places and practices where these things belong.
The artists are aware of how the conventions of the museum - its systems of classification, display and exhibition - turn all artefacts, whatever their history and function, into potential works of art: objects to be looked at. Removed from the everyday, they are diverted from their rich and varied lives, where they are used, broken, abandoned, found, repaired and re-used, inherited, lost or given and received as presents. Use value returns the ceramic collection to the social world of things.
 Wim Delvoye (Born Belgium, lives and works in Ghent)
Wim Delvoye is a sculptor who transforms utilitarian objects using materials and processes associated with the applied arts including hand-painted tiles, stained glass and woodcarving. Most of his projects require the participation of highly experienced artisans with skills that are increasingly rare in a world of mass-produced objects.
From 1990-99, Delvoye designed a number of carved teak versions of the tools and vehicles found on building sites, such as a life-size Nissan cement lorry and this cement mixer. The sculpted works were executed by artisans in Indonesia. Ironically, Delvoye had to go to a former Dutch colony to find craftsmen who could carve in the style of the European Baroque. Like many small ornamental craft items made to satisfy the tastes of tourists, the cement mixer exhibited here says more about the Western view of non-Western cultures than it does about these other cultures. It also serves as a reminder that many Western applied arts, traditionally associated with 'high' culture, are now kept alive by the very cultures the West once sought to dominate.
The decorative style of the cement mixer is echoed by the carved objects, such as the magnificent Italian lantern, the storage chests and other furnishings on display in the adjacent Gallery 21, Europe 1500-1600.
 Jeff Koons (Born US, lives and works in New York)
Jeff Koons's sculptures draw on both 'high' art and popular culture. His deliberately 'banal' subject matter straddles the boundaries of art and kitsch, and explores our consumer society's desire for objects. In these works from his Statuary series (1986), Koons not only refers to figurines sold in gift shops, but also to the objets d'art made popular in the eighteenth century such as snuff boxes and ormolu mounts, here reinterpreted in stainless steel.
Koons has often looked to the Baroque and Rococo for inspiration, in part because of the associations these styles have with frivolity, excess and corrupt taste. Indeed, when the V&A accepted into its collection the small panelled boudoir of Madame de Sérilly, Henry Cole, the then Director, wrote in his diary that "it was quite right to buy good examples of bad styles." In 1882 the magazine The Builder, described the collection of objects in these galleries dating from the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI as "some of the richest, most gorgeous and most painstaking, as well as successful work, which the world has ever seen. But it also represents in many instances a most frivolous and false taste, the true indication of the likings of a society in which all was show and glitter, luxury and selfishness, and which prized richness and ostentation above the pure taste in art of which it, in fact knew little or nothing." Yet, these objects shown at the V&A, popularised and prized by the aristocrats who collected them, conferred great status upon their owners as arbiters of 'taste'. Koons's four sculptures question how we determine whether such objects are 'art' or kitsch. They also address the powerful allure of objects and how they attain status and value within the context of the art museum.
 Liza Lou (Born US, lives and works in California)
Liza Lou uses glass beads to create environments modelled upon those of ordinary suburban Americans. The obsessive detail of her domestic settings gives prominence to women's traditional activities and the dignity of manual labour.
Lou's Kitchen revels in the activity of its inhabitants, including homely features such as the dishes soaking in the sink and the dinner cooking on the oven, each densely and lovingly rendered bead by bead. The artist's use of beading in part evokes cultural traditions such as those of the Native Americans, and also the use of beads by hobbyists to embellish household objects. The exquisite effect of the dazzling colours, and the painstaking attention to minute details, are a clear challenge to notions of what traditionally constitutes fine art or craft.
Lou's respect and affection for pattern and ornamentation recall that of the fervent adherents of the Victorian Arts and Crafts Movement, the nineteenth-century artists and artisans responsible for the comprehensive decorative schemes of the V&A's three original refreshment rooms - the Gamble Room with its glazed ceramic surfaces, the painted panels and glass of the William Morris Room and the Poynter Room's blue and white Minton tiles (off Galleries 13 and 15).
This installation also serves as a reminder of the critical role women have played in the history of the applied arts as represented in the V&A's building as much as in its collections. The Minton tiles in the Poynter Room, for example, were executed by women. Equally notable is the mosaic floor in Gallery 46, Fakes and Forgeries, executed by women prisoners in Woking Jail.
The V&A has an extraordinary bead-encrusted, ornamental urn and stand from Brunswick, Germany (1755-72), which can be seen in Gallery 5b, Europe 1600-1800. A once highly popular form of decoration, beads strung on threads were often applied to other objects, such as tabletops, tea caddies and vases.
 Roxy Paine (Born US, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York)
Roxy Paine's SCUMAK, a machine that automatically fabricates 'sculptures', considers the value placed on the handmade over the machine made. The SCUMAK is a computer-driven machine that has been programmed by the artist to produce one abstract sculpture each day. Polyethylene is poured gradually into the machine, is dyed and then slowly dripped from a nozzle onto a conveyer belt. The computer 'directs' the rate of the flow, its duration and the cooling period of the materials.
The originality, authenticity and, indeed, the quality of works of art are, traditionally, defined through the 'hand' of their makers, through being, literally, handmade. Yet here, the artist has created an art-making machine which functions like an automated factory, with its precision engineering and streamlined efficiency, and in so doing explores what happens when a mechanical process is applied to works of art.
Are Roxy Paine's machine-made sculptures less authentic as 'art' objects for having been manufactured? Is manufactured art as 'fake' as the objects in this Fakes and Forgeries Gallery?
 J. Morgan Puett and Suzanne Bocanegra (Born US, live and work in Pennsylvania and New York respectively)
Both J. Morgan Puett and Suzanne Bocanegra have a particular interest in the history of dress, textiles and design. In 1998, the artists began research on the design of a tartan to represent New York City. The final design was based upon their study of statistics, which revealed the city's economic and ethnic compositions. In the #599 Manhattan Financial Tartan, each thread corresponds to the household income distribution of the city (for example, silver represents an annual income of US $100,000 or more per annum) and the relation of household income to the postal code running north/south the #600 Manhattan Ethnic Tartan, each thread represents the highest percentages of ethnicity in each neighbourhood, for example, shell represents European people, and golden sand, Asian Pacific people.
The artists worked with Geoffrey (Tailor) Highlands Crafts, Ltd, a Scottish Tartan Mill, to have their designs officially registered as tartans and to produce the fabrics. On display are objects and clothing made from both tartans including: 'uniforms' such as a Stock Exchange worker's smock and a Wall Street broker's suit, a dustman's overalls and a waiter's apron - and 'tartanware' home accessories, including a CD player with head phones and a coffee mug.
The Manhattan Tartan Project considers how textiles, like tartan, can convey cultural messages. The V&A collection includes examples of tartans from samples acquired from the Great Exhibition of 1851 to tartans made into fashionable mini-dresses of the late 1960s.
 Marc Quinn (Born UK, lives and works in London)
Marc Quinn is a sculptor for whom the human body provides the primary subject and, sometimes, the literal material from which his figures are made. He is perhaps best known for his 'cast' of his own head created from his blood and kept 'alive' in a refrigeration unit. Quinn's work questions the capacity of sculpture to recast reality, as well as its tendency to define form in terms of fixed ideals of what is natural or beautiful.
This series comprises nude, life-size marble portraits of four men and four women deprived of one or more limbs as a result of birth, illness or accident. The figures, made by craftsmen in Italy, recall classical sculptures that have lost limbs and exist as fragmented originals. Their surfaces are pristine, white and unblemished and there are no signs of chisel marks, giving the impression of an artificial perfection. However, Quinn's use of the sitters' names emphasises that these sculptures represent individuals, and not mythological figures. His sculptures challenge and displace the classical ideal of 'beauty' and the category of the heroic and perfected nude, as favoured by Antonio Canova, for example, in two of his works on view in this gallery, The Three Graces, 1814-17, and Theseus and the Minotaur, 1782.
 Andres Serrano (US, lives and works in New York)
Although Serrano's works are among the most graphic and stirring in contemporary art, they are also among the most traditional, drawing upon a history of Christian symbolism that can also be seen in the objects on display in these galleries, such as chalices, chasubles, reliquaries, crosses and altarpieces.
In his photographs from the Morgue series, Serrano explores the contemporary attitude of hygienically separating death from daily life. He created these works by obtaining permission from a pathologist and a forensic expert working in an actual morgue. These works refer to the contemplation of the mortality of the flesh and immortality of the spirit that was commonplace in memento mori images, particularly those of the seventeenth century. A wound on the foot in The Morgue (Rat Poison Suicide II) recalls the stigmata, the miraculous marking of hands and feet resembling the wounds of the crucified Christ, while the central role of sacrifice in both the Old and New Testaments is suggested in Cabeza de Vaca. Other works are connected to the themes of martyrdom and redemption.
The artist often uses his own bodily fluids as the subject for works such as Precious Blood, which refers to the blood of Christ and the mystical process of transubstantiation in which, according to Catholic doctrine, the bread and wine change into the substance of the body and blood of Christ when consecrated in the Eucharist. Budapest (Mother and Child) draws on prototypes of the enthroned Madonna and Child, of which numerous fine examples exist in the V&A's collections and particularly in this gallery.
The artist has always been frank about his use of religious subject matter, which he says is based on "unresolved feelings about my own Catholic upbringing, which help me redefine and personalize my relationship with God. For me, art is a moral and spiritual obligation that cuts across all manner of pretence and speaks directly to the soul."
 Yinka Shonibare (UK, lives and works in London)
Yinka Shonibare was born in London and grew up in Nigeria. The artist uses brightly coloured 'Dutch' wax print and 'African' textiles in his work to comment on issues of race, identity, cultural hybridity and the legacy of colonialism. This type of textile is a by-product of various colonial transactions, from its exportation from Indonesia to Holland, to its final appropriation and redeployment in Africa in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and so strictly speaking is neither Dutch nor African.
The artist has stated, "African fabric: signifies African identity, rather like American Jeans (Levi's) are an indicator of trendy youth culture. In Brixton, African fabric is worn with pride amongst radical or cool youth. It manifests itself as a fashion accessory with Black British women in the head wrap form and it can also be found worn by Africans away from the home country. It becomes an aesthetics of defiance, an aesthetics of reassurance, a way of holding on to one's identity in a culture presumed foreign or different."
Shonibare's work parodies the 'African' heritage that is suggested by these culturally hybrid contemporary textiles. It indicates how, in the West, the complex reality of contemporary Africa, which comprises many cultures, languages, beliefs and political systems, is often homogenised and reduced to the clichés embodied in these textiles.
Mr And Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads is based on the well-known eighteenth-century painting by Thomas Gainsborough in the National Gallery, London. The black mannequins are clothed in eighteenth-century Eropean style dress made of 'African' textiles, so questioning our assumptions about the nature of British identity.
 Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japan, lives and works in New York and Tokyo)
Hiroshi Sugimoto's work explores how 'culture' is displayed in museums. Over the past year the artist has photographed contemporary and historic personalities captured in wax and on display in museums such as London's Madame Tussaud's.
One of the most striking groups in this body of work comprises black and white images of kings and queens of England, represented here by Queen Victoria. Strangely more life-like than the wax effigy it depicts, this photograph sets up a dialogue between the manual labour of painting and photography - a means of mechanical reproduction. To enhance the relationship to painting, the artist isolated the wax figure from its surroundings, posed it in a three-quarter view against a black backdrop, and lit it in an imitation of a Rembrandt painting. The 'subject' appears timeless and de-contextualised. Ironically, perhaps, Sugimoto has never made photographic portraits of living people.
The V&A was renamed by Queen Victoria, in 1899, when she laid the foundation stone of the Cromwell Road wing in what was then known as the South Kensington Museum. Patron portraits of the Queen and prince Albert can be seen over the arches on either side of the Main Entrance. Sugimoto's photograph of the Queen is based on what has become an indelible, indeed iconic, image of the ageing sovereign in mourning.
Seen in the context of the V&A, a Museum many think of as a reflection of the prevailing values of Victoria's age, Sugimoto's photograph questions the nature of cultural identity, and its formation through cultural clichés, kitsch, and indeed, museums.
 Philip Taaffe (US, lives and works in New York)
Philip Taaffe is one of the most important painters to have emerged from the American 'Neo-Geo' group of the 1980s. His significant contribution to abstract painting is his unusual combination of layered allusions to decorative traditions across the history of ornament internationally. The ornamental dimension of his work is a nod to traditions associated with the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Josef Hoffman and the Viennese Secessionists as well as to Abstract Expressionism and the optical works of Bridget Riley.
Taaffe's references include textiles, manuscript illumination, wrought-ironwork, woodcarving, stained glass and Islamic architectural sculpture. The bright arabesques and interlacings found on the tile panels from mosques in Syria and Turkey, the grand, turned wood pulpit from Cairo, as well as the sophisticated optical effects of foreshortening and diminution on the Ardabil Carpet, all in this gallery, are closely related to the forms and patterns that have provided inspiration for Taaffe's art.
The V&A's Arts of the Islamic World Gallery includes objects from across the Middle East. Unlike the majority of other galleries in the Museum, which are categorised by country or region, the carpets and textiles, tiles, woodcarvings, glass, ceramics and architectural ornamentation are here organised in one space according to a broad cultural grouping defined by religion, economics and politics. In the context of this gallery, the calligraphy and the Islamic symbolism contained in the patterns embellishing the objects are appreciated primarily by Western viewers as elegant abstractions detached from their cultural and religious significance. In a similar way Taaffe's work elides cultural boundaries to create vibrant paintings that inventively conflate and collage his sources transforming them into cross-cultural and composite images that are subliminally suggestive without ever fully revealing their origins or a singular meaning.
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