Living History

**Uh, I have no idea why my template is suddenly being so weird and highlighting things and replace fonts with Comic Sans.  It's important that you know that I would never use Comic Sans, and that I'll be tinkering with my formatting over the weekend to get everything shipshape.  (Which will be a lot punnier once you read the post below...)**

“Museums are filled with cases of tools that no one knows how to use anymore. A repaired ax is a living tradition.”

--The Same Ax, Twice by Howard Manfield  [First chapter available online]

photo by Mark Wilson, Boston Globe

After diving down a rabbit hole that I opened by reading this post on Paul Orselli's ExhibiTricks blog (Oh, I wish I could have gone to AAM this year!), I ended up at an online copy of the first chapter of Howard Manfield’s  book, The Same Ax, Twice.  Having just reserved my library’s copy of the full book, I only have this chapter to work off of, but it’s given me a lot of food for thought.  (As has Paul Orselli’s post on the "Is it Real?" workshop – I’m eagerly awaiting the day the audio copy of that session is available for purchase online because holy schmoly is that right up my alley or what?)

The quote at the top of this page spins off from an old joke Manfield relates earlier in the chapter – an anecdote in which a farmer claims that he’s had the same axe his whole life, and has only replaced the handle three times and the head twice.  (ba-dum-ching!) You've probably seen some variation of that before, but Manfield uses this old saw as a sort of call to arms for restoration.  Not just the restoration in the sense of fixing something and putting it in a case, but the living restoration of tall ships and heritage sites:  the restoration of an axe that’s used every day.

Please go read the chapter.  It’s insightful and deeply poetic, and it brings up a point that I had not thought about before – that the act of preserving something big, like a manor house or a wooden ship is also the act of preserving the skills needed to create and repair that same thing.  In a world of power tools and motorboats, it means something to repair and rig a ship by hand.  We can put artifacts in cases to preserve them, but doing that removes them from hands that could use those artifacts and contributes to the death of certain skills. It gives me a new vantage point on the idea of living history.  It’s not just pleasant volunteers in hoop skirts churning butter and gamely pretending they don't know what your iPhone is – it’s real people working hard to remember not just how things were, but how we used to do them.

Now, I still think that it's vitally important to preserve the objects of our past. But it's worth thinking about ways in which we can preserve both the tool and the skills needed to operate it.

We'll pick up on next week with another spin on the same idea - preserving an artifact vs. preserving a way of life, and whether a replica that can be handled can be more valuable than an original that's locked away.  Enjoy your long weekend!

Replicas

Chernobyl and contagion thinking have gotten me thinking about replicas. [ed note:...Every time I type that word I almost type "replicants" instead, which would make this a very different kind of blog indeed.] Both Nemeroff the psychologist and Sobolev the Chernobyl survivor make the point that original objects have a power that replicas don't.  Whether it's your grandmother's ring or radioactive graphite, there's something lost when a copy is made.  But how does that thinking work in museums, where originals are so rare and sometimes so fragile?

As I said yesterday, I agree with the general idea that there is a difference between the real thing and a copy--and I think there are few who would argue that.  But in the world of museums, originals aren't always an option...and they might not always be the best option, even when they are available.  In Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History there is an extensive Hall of Plants.  It's full of beautiful specimens of plants and flowers from across the globe, from delicate blossoms to tall trees.  The one thing each of these has in common is that they're all fake.  Not fake like silk flowers you buy at the dollar store, but fake like a counterfeit painting that is almost indistinguishable from the original.  The leaves of each plant are made of paraffin cast in a plaster mold, and each plaster mold was cast from a real individual leaf.  The flowers are made largely from glass, but handled so dextrously that you'd never know it hadn't grown and bloomed in that case.  The "real" plants long ago withered, and are held in storage in the herbarium, but these "fakes" that were so lovingly created keep these stunning organisms--some of them now extinct or extremely rare--alive to the visiting public.

Of course, the Field Museum has more famous replicas than the Hall of Plants.  SUE, the largest, most complete T.rex ever found makes its home at the Field, and is the star attraction to many visitors.  What many don't realize at first glance is that the dinosaur's toothy grin is fake, the whole skull a replica.  The Field Museum has the real skull on display on the balcony above the rest of the fossil, but its weight makes it impossible to mount on the armature.  Even if it could be mounted, the position in which it fossilized--the lower jaw smashed into the upper part of the skull and the whole thing skewed sideways--wouldn't make sense to the average visitor.  In this case the replica skull, cast carefully from the real thing, makes the SUE fossil a more accurate and complete view of what the dinosaur would have been like in life than if the Field had somehow been able to use the true skull.

And really, neither of these examples begins to tough on how replicas make rare artifacts more accessible to the public which is another valid argument in their defense.  Not viable for scientific study, casts and replicas of everything from fossils to pueblos make artifacts that would otherwise be out of their reach available to museum-goers all over the world.  Sure, it lacks that amazing little frisson of knowing that you're looking at the real thing--that's why touring shows with the actual artifacts from Tut's tomb will always be blockbusters while the replicas in the Ancient Egypt exhibit are overlooked--but the exposure has to count for something.

...So I'm still torn on this whole topic.  On the one hand, I don't want you to hold up any old pillow and pretend it's the one Lincoln's head lay on as he died.  On the other hand, a full-scale traveling replica of SUE is going to the Dominican Republic next spring, and it may be just the thing to inspire a whole generation of Dominican scientists-to-be who would never be able to see the real deal in Chicago.

I'd love to hear what others out there think!  What's your opinion?  Are replicas important tools or pointless fakes?  (Or, more likely, something in between?)

is it still a museum if no one sees the exhibits?

Last week I read Svetlana Alexievich's heartrending book, Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster.  Alexievich is a journalist who interviewed people involved in Chernobyl--villagers, politicians, physicists, soldiers--for three years, and turned those interviews into the monologues that make up this astonishing book.  It's something everyone should read., and it details how little most people in Belarus knew about the dangers of radiation, and how little the government did to inform them.

One of the things that struck me most was an interview with Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev, who discussed how the Soviet mindset contributed to the deception because they lied to themselves as much as the government lied to them.  In 1996, when the interview was recorded, Sobolev was gathering artifacts for a Chernobyl Museum.  It doesn't seem to be the official museum in Kiev, as he references an artifact there as being different than what he has, and I can't track much else down about either his Chernobyl Museum or Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev himself.  But here's what he said that struck me the most:

"Now do you understand how I see our museum?  In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful.  And there's a miner's helmet.  Also from there.  Some farmer's equipment from the Zone.  We can't let dosimeters in here--we're glowing!  But everything here needs to be real.  No plaster casts.  People need to believe us.  And they'll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl.  There were and there are still."  (Alexievich 138)

Excerpted here it doesn't carry the weight it does as a part of the whole text, but I find myself both sympathetic and torn.  Learning how many people sacrificed their lives (and their health, and the health of their children and loved ones) without realizing what they were doing I understand the deep need for authenticity.  But that same authenticity almost certainly assure that your museum can only be visited by people who either still don't believe the radiation is dangerous or who are already so affected by it that wandering around rooms full of highly radioactive artifacts won't do them any more harm.

And this all gets to a deeper question, one that's not so far away from the old puzzler, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'  Is it enough for a museum to preserve history even if no one visits it?  Is a museum the collection of artifacts, or the collective experience of seeing the artifacts and learning the history?  The museum Sobolev describes certainly has an authenticity that the official museum in Kiev seems to lack, but if that authenticity comes at the cost of outsiders being able to begin to understand the experience, is it worth it?  Perhaps just knowing such a place exists is enough, perhaps that knowledge automatically balances what may be a less "real" exhibit, but it's hard to say.

Regardless of this existential puzzle, you should go read Voices from Chernobyl immediately.