Mark Dion's installations

 

 

What distinguished cabinets of curiosity, the precursors of today's museums, was the juxtaposition of disparate specimens to show their variety. American artist Mark Dion achieves just that in his installations. The New York Times speaks of "the curious mix of obsession and emotion on display." Sometimes Dion centers on an individual, like American naturalists William Bartram (1739-1823) or Alexander Wilson (1766–1813). He has the enviable privilege of combing through the specimens in storage (1st image) and assembling them into triumphant visual displays of natural history objects in hand-built cabinets. "Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between 'objective' ('rational') scientific methods and 'subjective' ('irrational') influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkabinetts of the sixteenth century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens," reads his bio from the Art 21 series on PBS. While his work has graced art museums and galleries (2nd image, a preparatory drawing for his 1999 piece at the Museum of Modern Art) around the world in group and solo exhibitions, it is his assemblages specific to individual science and natural history museums* - some of them installed permanently - that I find particularly compelling. Sibella Court comments that the process is as important as the finished piece. Dion himself writes: "By critically analyzing the master narratives and techniques of display employed by the institution, I can discern the ideology embedded in them. Being critical may also be just another way to love these museums." Mark Dion has delivered many lectures and received numerous awards. Read more about his work here.

*Here is a partial list:

Musée Océanographique, Monaco
Springhornhof Institute of Neolithic Archeology, Germany 
Natural History Museum, England (3rd image)
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature,France
Historisches Museum, Germany
Fabric Workshop and Museum, United States
Musée Gassendi and la Reserve Geologique de Haute Provence, France
University of Tokyo Museum, Japan
National Railway Museum, England 

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Previous posts about museums:

Darwin's drawers

The museum that wasn't

Stringsavers

"Through the Weeping Glass"

Mütter movie

Wet specimens

Science center weddings

Library of Human Imagination

Adventurers Club

Museum behind the Scenes

Madame Tussaud

Kunstkammer

Funeral museums

My museum

The Museum of Osteology

The museum that wasn't

I had another post planned for today, but as my readers know by now, I love to enumerate and the story I read late last night offers just that opportunity...

Above are photos* and below is a list of some of the 8,000 artifacts amassed by former 7-term Harrisburg mayor Stephen Reed in the hope that an exhibit of the same would draw tourists to the Pennsylvania capital:

• a Conestoga wagon and a stagecoach
• muskets, pistols, and ammunition, including a slug from the 1876 battle of Little Big Horn
• Indian effigies
• a tomahawk that may have been owned by Chief Crazy Horse
• Native American art, a canoe, and a teepee
• salmon dried by Eskimos and sold during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896
• period photographs and tintypes
• an antique typewriter
• cactus skeletons, some up to 10' tall
• clothing, including hats and moccasins
• household goods, including blankets, pottery, knives, and medicine bottles
• Seventh Cavalry telescope and bugle
• the gates to the OK Corral
• Virgil Earp’s watch and badge
• Wyatt Earp’s last saddle, shaving kit, and saloon table
• Buffalo Bill’s megaphone
• Doc Holliday's flask, coat, and shaving mirror
• a wanted poster for Jesse James
• a painting shot through by Calamity Jane
• Annie Oakley's suitcase and tiara
• a mounted bison

The city has invited appraisers and auction houses (and photographers) into the warehouse where the items have been stored. Auctions in 2007 and 2008 netted $1.66 million, so the city hopes this latest venture will recoup some of the $15 million in public funds that Reed spent to buy the collection. Since the imagined Wild West Museum never materialized, it is hoped that the income will chip away at the $300 million that Harrisburg owes debtors.

*Slideshows at WGAL.com, SFgate.com, and newyorktimes.com.

Moss man

"The dog then bit the ground that in turn cried out in pain."

So said Sgt. David Thompson of the Washington County Sheriff's Office in describing the investigation of a possible break-in at Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals last October. The collection includes an estimated $250,000 worth of gold and other precious stones. Deputies had installed security devices at the Hillsboro, Oregon, museum earlier in the month after a caretaker noticed a large hole in the bathroom wall. When the alarm sounded a few days later, they responded with a K9 unit and searched the grounds before dawn. They found a bike and a backpack, then the police dog led them to a wooded area about 1/2 mile away from the building. The suspect cried out when the K9 bit him, and police realized that he had been concealed on the ground in a camouflage outfit. He was dressed in a ghillie suit, a head-to-toe outfit worn by military snipers to blend in with vegetation. The man was identified as Gregory Liascos, 36, a resident of Portland. He was not found with any stolen goods, but was arrested on burglary and criminal mischief charges. After his photo (above) appeared in the media, he became known as the "Moss Man," with Liascos claiming that the episode was all a misunderstanding with his children over a Halloween costume. Well, just in time for this year's holiday, the Moss Man is back in the news. The jury was sent home and the judge issued a bench warrant after he failed to show up for his trial on Tuesday. The Seattle Weekly blog calls the photo of Liascos in his Moss Man outfit priceless and comments, "He may in fact be in the courtroom right now..."

Classic

The 1st thing I did to confirm another e-mail making the rounds was to check Snopes. A post in the "Fauxtography" category calls into question the authenticity of the accompanying photograph (3rd image), since a blurrier photo (2nd image) is used in the press release, but the story holds up. Here is my version, in timeline form, with some of the details corrected:

1928: Allen Swift of Springfield, Massachusetts, graduated from college and received a brand new pistachio Rolls-Royce Picadilly P1 Roadster (1st image) as a gift from his father. The automobile had been manufactured in their hometown, one of 2,944 luxury vehicles produced at the plant before it closed its doors in 1935.

1988: Swift, by then a retired entrepreneur in his 80s living in West Hartford, Connecticut, commissioned Automotive Restorations, Inc. (Stratford, Conn.), to remove the body from the frame, to send the engine to his long time friend Frank Cooke (1913-2005) at the Vintage Garage (Brookfield, Mass.) for reconditioning, and to restore the frame, body, and interior to its original color - a 2-tone green combination with gold leaf striping and initials. "The Swift Rolls-Royce still runs smoothly and remains in pristine condition after [its] work over....Well cared for all its life, it was a treat to restore. Once done, we called to ask Allen when he would like it delivered. 'Delivered?' he said. 'I’ll pick it up.' And he did."

1994: Swift was presented with a "Spirit of Ecstasy" award by Rolls-Royce at their annual meeting to recognize him for owning his Phantom longer than anyone in the world had ever owned an individual Rolls-Royce.

2002: Swift, then age 99, approached the Springfield Museums to discuss the disposition of his antique car. Convinced that they would care for it, he offered to donate the Rolls-Royce and a building to house it.

2005: In the summer, a building adjacent to the existing museums campus went on the market, so Swift donated $1 million to purchase it and signed over his Rolls, largely underwriting the cost of establishing the Museum of Springfield History, which opened a few years later. Swift died in October at the age of 102, having put 172,000 miles on the car and ensuring his posterity as a legend among Rolls-Royce collectors.

Stringsavers

My Dad, who is heading home today after a good visit, is a self-acknowledged stringsaver. He does not embody the expression as literally* as some. With a little poking, I found that there are several contenders for the world's biggest ball of string:

• The largest sisal twine ball built by one person is located in Darwin, Minnesota. Begun in 1950, it is 12' in diameter and weighs 10,400lbs.
• The largest sisal twine ball built by a community is located in Cawker City, Kansas. Begun by an individual in 1953, it became a community project in 1974 and has grown to 17,886lbs. and a circumference of 40'.
• The heaviest ball of twine ever built is located in Lake Nebagamon, Wisconsin. Begun in 1979, it weighs an estimated 19,336lbs. and is still growing.
• The largest twine ball ever built, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is located by the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Branson, Missouri, and measures 41.5' in circumference (2nd image).

But the best stringsaver story was revealed in the book Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey. A review in the New York Times (from which I poached the 1st image, by Tom Gauld) relates:

"We meet, for example, Leslie Bairstow, an expert on belemnites (the fossil remains of ancient squid-like beings) who joined the museum in 1932. During his tenure at the museum, Bairstow published nothing but collected everything, including the string from parcels that had been sent to him. When he retired, the string turned out to have been filed in boxes according to length; one box contained 'pieces of string too small to be of use'.”

*The English major in me prompts me to point out that "literally" is the most recent word to be overused - and misused - by the media. In yesterday's coverage of the anniversary of 9/11, Pierre Thomas commented that the attacks "caught Americans literally with their pants down." Um, Pierre, while some of us were surely on the john at the time, this would qualify as a figurative use of the expression.

Puzzled

This story, reported by the Associated Press and repeated word-for-word on many sites and blogs, makes no sense to me. Follow along and I'll tell you why. According to the very brief news item from Wednesday, a man dressed in black ran away from a museum in Stavanger, Norway, with his big white dog. He had just stolen a whale tooth that was more than 100 years old and valued at around $9,300. The tooth was reported to be 8' (2.5m) long. The image is strange and striking, isn't it? Except that no whale - living or dead - has 8-foot teeth. The largest whale in the world, the blue whale, does not have teeth. The largest toothed whale, the sperm whale, has teeth that are only inches long (see 3rd* and 4th images). Although the name of the town is identified, it has more than one museum. However, the Stavanger Museum has on exhibit the skeleton of a minke whale (example, 2nd image) slaughtered with a scythe in Gandsfjord in 1884. The specimen is old enough to fit the description, but, like blue whales, minke whales have baleen instead of teeth. As you can see from the photo, they do have jawbones that would probably have been within reach. It may have been one of these that was snatched, and it would have been the reported length and light enough to be carried off by the thief (1st image shows a zoologist holding a minke whale jawbone). As my sister said in response to my post about rhinoceros horns being poached from museums, thefts like this "make my blood boil." I hope the man in black is caught and the object is returned. I think I have made some reasonable suppositions here as to what exactly that was, but if readers have anything to add, please do!

*Note that to further complicate things, the whale skeleton in the source article is identified incorrectly as a blue whale instead of a sperm whale.

Indoor poaching

Now that the numbers of rhinoceros in the wild are dwindling and ever more sophisticated techniques are employed to catch poachers, thieves are targeting the natural history museums and auction houses of the United Kingdom and Europe. At least 20 museums and other establishments (most of which are listed below) have been plundered of their rhino mounts so far by members of a suspected international crime ring doing irreparable damage:

• Haslemere Educational Museum, Surrey, UK
• Ipswitch Museum, Surrey, UK (1st and 2nd images)
• Sworder’s Auctioneers, Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, UK
• Natural History Museum, Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany
• Zoology Museum, Hamburg, Germany
• Hunting Museum Wulff, Dedelstorf, Saxony, Germany (3rd image)
• Brussels Natural History Museum, Brussels, Belgium
• Africa Museum, Namur, Belgium
  
• Museum of Natural History, Gothenburg, Sweden
• Natural History Museum, Florence, Italy
• Natural History Museum, Blois, France
• Museum of Science, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Kitale Museum, Kenya
• Mammal Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
• Transvaal Museum, Pretoria, South Africa
• Aristocratic House of Liechtensteiner, Prague, Czech Republic

Even horns as old as these are mistakenly believed to be effective ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine (as a cure for cancer, not an aphrodisiac), and fetch twice the price of gold.

Cultural losses on 9/11

Secondary to the horrific loss of 2,606 lives in New York City on September 11, 2001, in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is the destruction of numerous artworks, artifacts, and irreplaceable historical records:

• A total of 300 drawings and sculptures by Auguste Rodin, owned by the Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage, where more than 650 employees were killed. Some fragments (1st image) were recovered. A cast of Rodin's "The Thinker" surfaced only to disappear.
• "The Sphere," a sculpture by German artist Fritz Koenig that stood in the World Trade Center plaza since 1971, was split and partially crushed by falling debris (3rd image). One of the only salvageable works of art found in the wreckage, it was restored and re-erected in Battery Park.
• Other works of art, including sculptures by Alexander Calder (images here), Louise Nevelson, James Rosati, Kenneth Snelson, and Masayuki Nagare; a painting by Roy Lichtenstein; tapestries by Joan Miró and Romare Bearden; murals by Germaine Keller, Hunt Slonem, and Cynthia Mailman; and a fountain commemorating the victims of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
  
• Nearly 900,000 objects excavated from the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan, a famous 19th c. slum. Only 18 of the unique artifacts documenting the lives of these working-class New Yorkers survive (photos here).
• A set of 40,000 negatives of President John F. Kennedy and his family by his personal photographer Jacques Lowe, most of which had never been published. Only 180 images, that had been removed from the fireproof vault for printing, survived.
• The archive of the offices of Helen Keller International, with the exception of 2 books (photo here) and a bust (2nd image). Photographs and Keller's correspondence were lost.
• The contents of the library and most of the video and photo archives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which ironically had a meeting scheduled for the day of the attacks with librarians from Rutgers and other institutions regarding transfer of the collection. Tens of thousands of images dating back to 1921, which represented a fraction of the total number, were found in the rubble at ground zero and nearby, including a contact sheet of pictures of the Port Authority's aviation director William DeCosta (image here).
• A collection of documents related to U.S. trade dating back to at least the 1840s housed at the Ferdinand Gallozzi Library of the U.S. Customs Service.

The World Trade Center Documentation Task Force convened within 2 weeks of the 9/11 attacks, but "Appropriately, agencies were more concerned with loss of life and rebuilding operations — not managing or preserving records," said David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States. And historical archaeologist Rebecca Yamin concurs, "It's hard to get emotional about the artifacts; they're just not significant compared to the loss of human life."

Dead birds as size scale

I was struck by the beautiful photograph above (1st image) of a hummingbird being used to show the size of a "monstrously big" ant that lived roughly 50 million years ago. The fossil was brought to his attention by the curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and reexamined by Bruce Archibald of Canada's Simon Fraser University. The prehistoric insect - "about the body mass of a small bird" - had remained unidentified since its discovery in Wyoming. Archibald named the new North American species Titanomyrma lubei and believed it to be closely related to German giant ants. When I researched the paleoentomologist's name, I found that he had used this visually exquisite size comparison not only with a different pose, but with another hummingbird (2nd image). I can only assume that Dr. Archibald had access to entire drawers full of birds and could take his pick - drawers that are the evocative subject of Rosamond Purcell. Above (3rd image) is one of the images from her most recent book, Egg and Nest.

Maison Mantin

Let's have a look inside the house/museum that I added to Quigley's Cabinet in January. For a closer look at the restoration of the house and its furnishings, you may wish to seek out the 1hr documentary L'énigme de la maison Mantin, which was filmed in 2007 (9th image) and broadcast on French TV when the museum opened to the public in November 2010.

IMAGES: 1) One of the many mounted animal specimens that Louis Mantin collected. 2) The restored fireplace, considered "strange and eclectic," features - from top to bottom - a sculpture of a woman's head, 2 ceramics of dead animals, a mirror, and a woodcarving of a devil fighting a dragon. 3) The lounge, arranged with Louis XV and XVI furniture and Italian artwork, has a patriotic candelabra and a window (center) into the next room. 4 and 5) The Pink (or Four Seasons) bedroom belonged to Louise Alaire, a married woman with whom Mantin had a 20-year affair. The room was lined with silk in a pattern called Les amours, and decorated with furniture in the style of Louis XV. 6) Mantin's bedroom, with walls covered in 18th c. French gilded leather. To give it a golden hue, it was covered with silver leaf and coated with yellow varnish. 7) Mantin's restored canopy bed. 8) The study in which Mantin housed his collections of antiquities.

House 100 years later

Morbid Anatomy beat me to it (not that we are in competition, but blogger Joanna Ebenstein and I have many interests in common). The news yesterday was the opening of a life-size time capsule in France that dates back more than a century. The period piece in question is a mansion in Moulins, France, owned by Louis Mantin (1855-1905). La Maison Mantin (as it appeared in 1910, 1st image, and as it appears today, 2nd and 3rd images)
was closed up and fell into disrepair when the owner died, but Mantin directed that it be made a museum in 2005. After $47 million in renovations, the mansion has now opened to the public after 106 years. Visitors are immersed in the life of a cultured gentleman of his day, just as Mantin wished. All the amenities are intact - rich fin-de-siecle furnishings, electricity, and a flushing toilet - and all the collections on display - Egyptian relics, Neolithic oil-lamps, and prehistoric flints; medieval locks, Masonic paraphernalia, mounted birds, and other curios. The result is a remarkable time-capsule, says the BBC about what was his personal museum.

Born in Moulins in 1851, Louis Mantin was a civil servant, but at the age of 42 inherited a fortune from his father and thereafter enjoyed a life pursuing the arts and sciences. He built his mansion in his hometown, on the site of a former regal Bourbon palace. Mantin and imported tapestries, paintings, and porcelain, and commissioned sculptures and wood-carvings. Knowing that his death was approaching, Mantin only had a few years to indulge his aesthetic fantasies. To save his collections and indulge is obsession with death and the passage of time, he put his instructions in his will. Assistant curator Maud Leyoudec explains, "A bachelor with no children....It was his way of becoming eternal." Mantin's great-niece Isabelle de Chavagnac, who would otherwise have inherited the property, observes, "The house was gradually forgotten by the world. But not by the people of Moulins. It is odd how the collective memory of a place never dies."

The last of the Shakers

Family friends returned from a stay in New Hampshire with news I did not know about. Shakers are a dying breed. Susy and Nick had been at the Canterbury Shaker Community in New Hampshire, which was established in 1792. Two hundred years later, there are no living members of the Society of Believers. The last one, Ethel Hudson, had lived there from the age of 7 until she died at the age of 96. "I'm the last pebble on the beach," she said just weeks before she died. From a total of 6,000 in the U.S. at one time, the Shakers' ranks thinned and once thriving communities have become living history museums: for example, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (est. 1783, with a peak of 300 members); Alfred, Maine (est. 1793); Enfield, New Hampshire (es. 1793, with a peak of 300 members); Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (est. 1805, with a peak of 500 members); and South Union, Kentucky (est. 1807).

The only living Shakers are at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in New Gloucester, Maine (est. 1783). There were 4 Shakers alive in 2006 - 2 middle-aged men and 2 elderly women. By April of this year, another death left only 3. It's just a matter of time... The reason for the decline of the Shakers is that they practice celibacy and only gained new members through conversion and the adoption of orphans. Then in 1965, a decision by the elders sealed their fate: they stopped accepting converts as new members.

Unlike the Amish, with whom they are sometimes confused, Shakers never eschewed technology, and in fact embraced it. They invented hundreds of labor-saving devices from the clothespin to the circular saw, which they shared without patents. They were, like the Amish, defined by their spiritual beliefs. Shakers say it’s a shame that people know them more for their furniture than for their religious ideas. A Shaker leader at Sabbathday once quipped, “When I die, I fairly expect to be remembered as a chair.”

1st image) Shaker meeting house, Maine, 2nd image) Cora Helena Sarle of the Canterbury Village Shaker Community, New Hampshire, 3rd image) Ethel Hudson of the Canterbury Community in 1989, 4th image) Inside the meeting house at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

Wet specimens

About 20 years ago, I had several animal skins on the walls of my "museum," but the deer skin (which, in my defense, may have been poorly preserved) rotted and fell off the wall, and my cat bit the tail off the coyote pelt. Although the kangaroo skin survived, I considered myself a poor curator of things tanned and taxidermied, and restricted my collection to bones and fossils. So when I mentioned that I ordered a marmoset fetus, my sister commented, "Thus ends the moratorium on fleshy purchases (in time for Christmas!)." Long ago, she had given me a bat preserved in a jar, but it got a little rough around the edges and that, too, had to go. I haven't had the luck of the Museum für Naturkunde (3rd and 4th images) in Berlin, which has brought together 1,000s of their jars of animals - fish, mammals, spiders, reptiles - while only breaking 6 in the process of assembling a new permanent exhibit. The wet specimens (octopus, 2nd image) went on display in a newly reconstructed wing on Tuesday. The museum was established in 1889 and some of the preparations are more than 200 years old. The exhibit (1st image) contains some 1 million objects stored in 276,000 jars containing a total of 21,600 gallons of alcohol and lined up on 7.8 miles of shelves. "These are valuable, irreplaceable cultural assets that have been collected over two centuries and remain indispensable for biological research to this day, and are extensively used internationally. It is a milestone for the preservation of our collections and provides optimal conditions for research into biodiversity and evolution," says the museum.