No sooner had the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi thrown his shoes in protest at the US president George Bush than people were calling for the offending items to be displayed in a national museum. They didn’t make it that far: US security forces destroyed them while checking for explosives. Luckily, the Trump baby balloon dodged a similar fate in July 2018, when it floated above crowds that had gathered to protest the president’s visit to the UK.
Ahead of Trump’s departure from the White House, the activists who designed and handled the blimp (its self-described “babysitters”) have decided to donate it to the Museum of London. The balloon will sit alongside ephemera from the movements led by the suffragettes and Chartists. Still, unlike these causes, the fight against Trump and everything he stands for – from rising inequality to the pollution of public discourse and the rise of the far-right – is far from over.
There’s a risk that by placing a piece of contemporary protest art in a museum, we create a false sense of security that this chapter in history is closed. It’s a question the blimp’s co-designer Matt Bonner wrestles with. “Looking at it afresh, with Trump clutching the phone with the blue Twitter screen, days after he has been banned from Twitter, it still resonates.”
Museums often acquire artefacts when they are far from historical – many of the items at the Museum of London related to the suffragettes were donated when the fight for women’s franchise was still going on. Recently curators have acquired placards from the anti-austerity demonstrations and the Black Lives Matter protests. Perhaps, just as with these objects, in 100 years’ time visitors will look at the blimp as representative not of a contemporary struggle, but as part of the story of how hope overcame hate during the 2020s.
Cultural institutions aren’t neutral actors in this process. In the UK, museums offer free entry and provide a space for people to encounter stories outside of their own experiences. Increasing accessibility is essential for political art: not everyone has the means or inclination to protest, and by exhibiting such objects outside of their original context they reach the widest possible audience.
One of the most exciting things about the Stop Trump movement and its star attraction, the blimp, was its ability to bring people together. One of the organisers of the first rally, Shaista Aziz, says, “I’d never seen a protest that diverse in my life. I remember seeing steelworkers who came from the north of England. I met a mum and her baby, and it was the first time she had ever been on a protest.”
Everyone from liberals to the radical left put aside differences for a moment against a common enemy and cracked a smile. “One of the best things about Trump baby was how he stood in as a figurehead for a whole load of different people who were coming to it from different places,” says Leo Murray, the balloon’s designer. “It created a sense of collective endeavour.” By putting the blimp in a public space, there’s an opportunity to share this spirit more widely – because if anything is going to change for the better, a sense of unity and common purpose will be vital.
Much will depend on how the museum’s curators choose to display the balloon. The tension between conservation and accessibility was made clear in the 2014 V&A exhibition, Disobedient Objects. The Museum of London declined to lend items from its collection for fear that the curators’ desire to exhibit them as they’d be experienced in protests, rather than mounted on plinths or behind glass, could damage them.
The details are still being worked out, but the museum may have found a balance between the two conflicting aims. Curators are exploring the idea of hanging the blimp from the rafters of the museum’s new home at Smithfield Market, alongside audio recordings from the balloon’s babysitters. This would allow visitors to experience the blimp as if they had been there and understand what it meant to the people behind it.
We’re yet to see how Trump’s legacy will play out, and how an emboldened far right will take its fight forward, but the blimp will exist as inspiration for how to resist it. The Trump baby itself sits within a long line of inflatable protest art – from Eclectic Electric Collective’s cobblestones, designed to disrupt and ridicule heavy policing at climate demos, to images of political opponents paraded by workers in the Soviet Union.
Of course, there will be some members of the public who find the balloon’s message and design disagreeable. There is also the possibility of activists wanting to remove their work if a museum fails to present their objects in a way they feel accurately reflects their intentions or values. In 2018, artists withdrew items from the Design Museum’s Hope to Nope exhibition after the institution hosted an arms industry event. But the benefits of displaying it outweigh any risks. The story goes that in the 19th century, access to museums was promoted to divert working-class leisure time away from seditious activities; now we need them to catalyse further change.