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拍品专文
Diamonds = Money, Clubs = War, Spades = Motherfuckers, Hearts = Culture
- Vivienne Westwood
In 2017 Dame Vivienne Westwood designed a set of playing cards. They were, in her words, ‘A Strategy 2 Save the World’.
`Vivienne saw this whole collection of playing cards as a way of explaining her ideas about how we could change the world for the better. So the Clubs are about war and destruction; Hearts are about the love of culture and art; Diamonds are about the economy and trying to change the economic system; Spades are for people that are destroying our Mother the Earth. But they also all interconnect’ (Joe Corré, 2024).
Realised in a digital format, juxtaposing image and text in a cut and paste aesthetic redolent of the highly-charged graphics of Westwood’s punk T-shirts from the 1970’s, the playing cards reflect her outspoken stance against systemic inequality and injustice, and her passionate advocacy for the environment.
Although Dame Vivienne campaigned for many causes including Amnesty International, War Child and Liberty, the climate emergency became a burning concern in the last two decades of her life. An ambassador for Greenpeace, in 2013, she designed their official `Save the Arctic’ Logo, and in 2015 launched a global campaign to stop drilling and industrial fishing in the area.
`She was a fantastic person to work with, she had so much creativity, so much energy and she was just such an extraordinary activist. She didn’t really care who she upset, she just spoke truth to power’ (John Sauven, former Head of Greenpeace, 2024).
An activist to the end, one of Dame Vivienne’s final acts in 2022 was to commission the publication of THE BIG PICTURE – Vivienne’s Playing Cards. Collect the cards. Connect the cards, a portfolio of ten playing cards which encapsulate her manifesto for change, to be sold for the benefit of Greenpeace. Anticipating that she may not live to see its fulfilment, she prepared 100 sheets of Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper prior to printing, signing each sheet with her playful autograph. The project was realized posthumously and published by The Vivienne Foundation in a deluxe edition of ten portfolios to coincide with Earth Day on 22 April 2024. The Vivienne Foundation was founded by Dame Vivienne Westwood and built upon her four-pillar approach to saving the world - halt climate change, stop war, defend human rights and protest capitalism. The Foundation continues Dame Vivienne’s legacy by raising awareness and raising funds for NGOs aligned with their mission to create a better society and halt climate change.
Dame Vivienne’s selection for THE BIG PICTURE– Vivienne’s Playing Cards. Collect the cards. Connect the cards feature some of the most iconic and controversial images from the Westwood lexicon, spanning her career as a fashion designer and campaigner. Recycled and reprised, they are emblazoned with Vivienne Westwood slogans and cyphers.
`The ten prints alongside the other playing cards are the essence of Vivienne’s politics, philosophy, designs and creativity and I think in her own words they were the best thing she’d ever done’ (Cora Corré, 2024).
10 of Clubs, based on a 1977 photograph of Westwood wearing the anti-fascist DESTROY T-shirt, now bears the legend ‘ME PUNK' and `SAVE THE WORLD – ONLY PERSON WITH A PLAN’. The Clubs symbol, representing war for Westwood, is emphatically crossed out and replaced with an hour glass, drawing the stark choice facing humanity between ongoing global conflict, and the imperative for united action to address the climate emergency. 6 of Diamonds revisits Dame Vivienne’s collaboration with the photographer and visionary Michael Roberts, ‘this woman was once a punk’, for the cover of Tatler in 1989, in which Roberts cast her in the guise of Margaret Thatcher. In her playing card version, Westwood’s Iron Lady utters ‘I give U CRA$H’, a scathing critique of an unsustainable financial system.
But the iconography of the playing cards also draws from other visual sources. 5 of Spades is a graphic representation of NASA’s geothermal map on climate change, reflecting the ramifications of a 5° rise in average global temperatures, rendering large parts of the planet uninhabitable. The map was deeply shocking for Westwood: `If you draw a line parallel with Paris, everything below that is uninhabitable. This means, by the end of this century, there will only be 1 billion people left. The point is to stop it! We have no choice between a green economy and mass extinction’. It is a stark warning, but also a clarion cry for action, a powerful provocation to collectively step up to the challenges we face.
The hopeful alternative of a culture-led, sustainable model of economic development, is visualized for Westwood by the Monstrance. Featured as the central image on the 8 of Hearts, blind-stamped on each sheet, and hand-embroidered in semi-metallic thread for the cover of the first portfolio no. I/X, it is the unifying theme which connects the cards. A sacred symbol originating in ecclesiastical ritual which Dame Vivienne adapted and incorporated into her own symbology, it is an image of unity, representing the planet, intersected with four numbers 1, pointing to the four corners of the earth.
`What is good for the planet is good for the economy. What is bad for the planet is bad for the economy. But also what is good for the planet is good for people. We could have a wonderful world where we helped each other…we only have to have the right aims and we get there’ (Dame Vivienne Westwood, TEDx Talks, 5 June 2014).
The sculptural stand of welded salvaged metal especially commissioned by The Vivienne Foundation for the sale of this portfolio is by the sculptor and founder of Mutoid Waste Company, Joe Rush. His collaborative relationship with Westwood began with the launch of CLIMATE REVOLUTION at the closing ceremony of the London Paralympic Games in 2012, where Dame Vivienne stunned the world by appearing Boudicca-like on a mobile stage resembling a throne, surrounded by a flaming forest of car exhaust pipes. Over the years this creative collaboration developed into a strong friendship. ‘Vivienne was attracted to my creative ethic, my underground stance and my lifelong commitment to bringing understanding to the problem of waste in the environment’ (Joe Rush). Rush’s industrial aesthetic, using found waste materials to construct fantastical assemblages and environments, chimed with Westwood’s own sustainable ethos.
`For me, the movement captured in this piece, suggests the undersea fauna reaching up from the seabed towards the defracted light of the surface – an environment both diverse and precious – one that the proceeds from the sale of THE BIG PICTURE will be used to defend – Vivienne’s CLIMATE REVOLUTION in action!’ (Joe Rush, London, 2024).
- Vivienne Westwood
In 2017 Dame Vivienne Westwood designed a set of playing cards. They were, in her words, ‘A Strategy 2 Save the World’.
`Vivienne saw this whole collection of playing cards as a way of explaining her ideas about how we could change the world for the better. So the Clubs are about war and destruction; Hearts are about the love of culture and art; Diamonds are about the economy and trying to change the economic system; Spades are for people that are destroying our Mother the Earth. But they also all interconnect’ (Joe Corré, 2024).
Realised in a digital format, juxtaposing image and text in a cut and paste aesthetic redolent of the highly-charged graphics of Westwood’s punk T-shirts from the 1970’s, the playing cards reflect her outspoken stance against systemic inequality and injustice, and her passionate advocacy for the environment.
Although Dame Vivienne campaigned for many causes including Amnesty International, War Child and Liberty, the climate emergency became a burning concern in the last two decades of her life. An ambassador for Greenpeace, in 2013, she designed their official `Save the Arctic’ Logo, and in 2015 launched a global campaign to stop drilling and industrial fishing in the area.
`She was a fantastic person to work with, she had so much creativity, so much energy and she was just such an extraordinary activist. She didn’t really care who she upset, she just spoke truth to power’ (John Sauven, former Head of Greenpeace, 2024).
An activist to the end, one of Dame Vivienne’s final acts in 2022 was to commission the publication of THE BIG PICTURE – Vivienne’s Playing Cards. Collect the cards. Connect the cards, a portfolio of ten playing cards which encapsulate her manifesto for change, to be sold for the benefit of Greenpeace. Anticipating that she may not live to see its fulfilment, she prepared 100 sheets of Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper prior to printing, signing each sheet with her playful autograph. The project was realized posthumously and published by The Vivienne Foundation in a deluxe edition of ten portfolios to coincide with Earth Day on 22 April 2024. The Vivienne Foundation was founded by Dame Vivienne Westwood and built upon her four-pillar approach to saving the world - halt climate change, stop war, defend human rights and protest capitalism. The Foundation continues Dame Vivienne’s legacy by raising awareness and raising funds for NGOs aligned with their mission to create a better society and halt climate change.
Dame Vivienne’s selection for THE BIG PICTURE– Vivienne’s Playing Cards. Collect the cards. Connect the cards feature some of the most iconic and controversial images from the Westwood lexicon, spanning her career as a fashion designer and campaigner. Recycled and reprised, they are emblazoned with Vivienne Westwood slogans and cyphers.
`The ten prints alongside the other playing cards are the essence of Vivienne’s politics, philosophy, designs and creativity and I think in her own words they were the best thing she’d ever done’ (Cora Corré, 2024).
10 of Clubs, based on a 1977 photograph of Westwood wearing the anti-fascist DESTROY T-shirt, now bears the legend ‘ME PUNK' and `SAVE THE WORLD – ONLY PERSON WITH A PLAN’. The Clubs symbol, representing war for Westwood, is emphatically crossed out and replaced with an hour glass, drawing the stark choice facing humanity between ongoing global conflict, and the imperative for united action to address the climate emergency. 6 of Diamonds revisits Dame Vivienne’s collaboration with the photographer and visionary Michael Roberts, ‘this woman was once a punk’, for the cover of Tatler in 1989, in which Roberts cast her in the guise of Margaret Thatcher. In her playing card version, Westwood’s Iron Lady utters ‘I give U CRA$H’, a scathing critique of an unsustainable financial system.
But the iconography of the playing cards also draws from other visual sources. 5 of Spades is a graphic representation of NASA’s geothermal map on climate change, reflecting the ramifications of a 5° rise in average global temperatures, rendering large parts of the planet uninhabitable. The map was deeply shocking for Westwood: `If you draw a line parallel with Paris, everything below that is uninhabitable. This means, by the end of this century, there will only be 1 billion people left. The point is to stop it! We have no choice between a green economy and mass extinction’. It is a stark warning, but also a clarion cry for action, a powerful provocation to collectively step up to the challenges we face.
The hopeful alternative of a culture-led, sustainable model of economic development, is visualized for Westwood by the Monstrance. Featured as the central image on the 8 of Hearts, blind-stamped on each sheet, and hand-embroidered in semi-metallic thread for the cover of the first portfolio no. I/X, it is the unifying theme which connects the cards. A sacred symbol originating in ecclesiastical ritual which Dame Vivienne adapted and incorporated into her own symbology, it is an image of unity, representing the planet, intersected with four numbers 1, pointing to the four corners of the earth.
`What is good for the planet is good for the economy. What is bad for the planet is bad for the economy. But also what is good for the planet is good for people. We could have a wonderful world where we helped each other…we only have to have the right aims and we get there’ (Dame Vivienne Westwood, TEDx Talks, 5 June 2014).
The sculptural stand of welded salvaged metal especially commissioned by The Vivienne Foundation for the sale of this portfolio is by the sculptor and founder of Mutoid Waste Company, Joe Rush. His collaborative relationship with Westwood began with the launch of CLIMATE REVOLUTION at the closing ceremony of the London Paralympic Games in 2012, where Dame Vivienne stunned the world by appearing Boudicca-like on a mobile stage resembling a throne, surrounded by a flaming forest of car exhaust pipes. Over the years this creative collaboration developed into a strong friendship. ‘Vivienne was attracted to my creative ethic, my underground stance and my lifelong commitment to bringing understanding to the problem of waste in the environment’ (Joe Rush). Rush’s industrial aesthetic, using found waste materials to construct fantastical assemblages and environments, chimed with Westwood’s own sustainable ethos.
`For me, the movement captured in this piece, suggests the undersea fauna reaching up from the seabed towards the defracted light of the surface – an environment both diverse and precious – one that the proceeds from the sale of THE BIG PICTURE will be used to defend – Vivienne’s CLIMATE REVOLUTION in action!’ (Joe Rush, London, 2024).