packing to move=not fun

so I've been packing for the big Florida move this week (a partial explanation for the paucity of posting), and I've been having some fun going through old boxes and pulling out the things that I have loved and packed away and forgotten.  In the past day I've found letters my mom wrote me when I went to college, a book my sister had shipped to me from England when I was in middle school because I couldn't wait for the US release, and a wooden dog my dad carved me when he was learning to whittle many years back.  They are tiny little treasures, tied to precious memories, and the hardest part about moving is facing the decision to pack them away and put them in storage or to let them go entirely.  I am TERRIBLE at letting go of things that remind me of happy or interesting memories (there's contagion thinking again, right?), and it occurred to me this weekend that one of the magical things about museums is that you never have to make that choice.  Once something is worthy of being accessioned into your collection it's there.  It's a part of your Museum and the story it tells forever.  (Or, you know, mostly forever.  There are always items that are de-accessioned, but they are generally much more rare than additions to the collections.)

Anyway, if I were a Museum moving would be easier in the sense that I wouldn't have to make that wrenching "keep or donate?" decision...but harder in a lot of other ways.  More on that next time--because there's a lot to think about when an institution wants (or needs) to pick up and head somewhere else.

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?)

Contagion Thinking as a Basis for Museums

Last week I caught an interesting story about water reclaimation on NPR's Morning Edition.  The gist of the story is that even when they're assured that sewage has been fully cleaned, most people will not want to drink the treated water--the clean product is too associated with its dirty beginnings in their minds.  You can listen to the full story here, but the part that interested me the most is excerpted here from the transcript on Morning Edition's website:

"Carol Nemeroff is one of the psychologists Haddad recruited to help him with his research. She works at the University of Southern Maine and studies psychological contagion. The term refers to the habit we all have of thinking — consciously or not — that once something has had contact with another thing, their parts are in some way joined.'It's a very broad feature of human thinking,' Nemeroff explains. 'Everywhere we look, you can see contagion thinking.'  Contagion thinking isn't always negative. Often, we think it is some essence of goodness that has somehow been transmitted to an object — think of a holy relic or a piece of family jewelry. Nemeroff offers one example: 'If I have my grandmother's ring versus an exact replica of my grandmother's ring, my grandmother's ring is actually better because she was in contact with it — she wore it. So we act like objects — their history is part of the object.'"

The bedroom in Petersen House where Lincoln died

And really isn't this thinking what's behind any historical museum?  The Petersen House in DC is like any other late 19th-century home...except that Abraham Lincoln died there.  The pillow that's encased in plexiglass there is not different from any other pillow, except for a connection to Lincoln that is almost completely intangible.   But even as I type that, I feel differently--that's the pillow that Abraham Lincoln died on.  No other pillow that was in that house on April 14th, 1865 matters, but that particular piece of bedding is now a piece of history, thanks to its proximity.  Other pillows from that house don't matter, and a replica wouldn't carry the same weight.

Even Ford's Theater is an example of Dr Nemeroff's contagion thinking, in a more roundabout manner.  The original theater was converted to office space and store house for decades, and all the furnishings from Lincoln's day were removed.  What visitors see now is a replica of the original theater that reopened in 1968, not the actual theater where Lincoln was shot.  If someone were to build that same replica even a block away, it would be a chintzy recreation of a morbid slice of American history.  But to rebuild it in the place where Lincoln actually died...well, that's just preserving history.

While I can stand back objectively from the waste water discussion in the original article and assert that the cleaned water is totally separate from it's origins, I can't say the same thing for the artifacts in the museums I love.  The objects we have that have touched history--whether it's a grandmother's ring of a president's pillow--are important, in ways that it is sometimes hard to define.

I've been missing you!

Sorry, my lovelies.  Museum business kept me from my museum ponderings this week.  Regular postings to resume tomorrow, with my apologies for the delay.

defined.

mu·se·um/myo͞oˈzēəm/

Noun: A building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited

There's a longer posting coming about what a museum is, but this definition seems incredibly lacking to me.  While I've not come to any definite conclusions about what a museum truly is, I know that it's more than a building.  A building without artifacts is a shell.  Artifacts without a building in which to be displayed are just someone's collection.  A building full of artifacts that no one comes to see is pointless...a museum is that magic combination of history, science, and community.

Obviously there's more to come on this subject, but I'm still working through it myself.

filler

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a museum since reading about the Chernobyl Museum.  More to come on that later, but I haven't been able to shape my thoughts into something coherent yet.  In the meantime, this:

 

The miniature worlds of old-school museum dioramas fascinate me.  The care and detail that go into these tiny worlds is astounding, and I kind of secretly wished that I was a small as the Indian in the Cupboard so I could explore them more fully.  So when my fancy-pants camera finally arrived in the mail, the old Native American hall with its amazing dioramas was the first place I went with it.  In the interest of full disclosure, there were a lot of crappy shots before I got these, and these are much more luck than skill...but I'm still really happy with them.

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.

giving directions

In a museum, giving directions can border on surreal.  For instance, I've just explained to a colleague that you can get to our office by turning right at Ancient Egypt and going in the door behind the giant squid.  And it's gotten to the point where that doesn't even sound odd to me any more.  I routinely tell hungry visitors that they can find the restaurant if they follow the dinosaur's tail, or that the bathrooms are just past China.

That's why I need to find a new museum at which to work when we move to Tampa--"Take a left at the drinking fountain" is exponentially less awesome than, "take the stairs behind the fossil fish up to Tibet and then take a right at the Cannonball Tree."

random phone call #1

Me: Thank you for calling the Museum, may I help you?

Older Gentleman: I have a rock that thinks it's a fossil I need you to look at.

Me: Hmm, sounds like you'd need to talk to Geology, then.  What kind of fossil do you think it is?

Older Gentleman: I don't know what it is and I don't care.  It's the rock that thinks its some kind of fossil, but I think its probably nothing special.

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: Well let me just transfer you up to Geology, then.

a worn spot on stone stairs.

The building I work in is nearly 100 years old.  This causes some issues (the Facilities crew tells me that 100-year-old plumbing all kinds of not fun), but mostly I think it's wonderful.  Not only do our collections preserve history for future generations, our very building is a record of how museums have grown and changed since the early 20th century.  One side of our main hall houses taxidermy animal dioramas that haven't changed since we opened our doors in 1921 while the other side of the hall boast exhibits with time lapse photography, touch screen technology, and virtual cave-painting.  It's kind of amazing.

And of all the amazing things in this building that's been absorbing history for over 90 years, my favorite spot is a side stairwell with a worn spot on the second landing.

The stairwell in question is outside my office, and I walk up and down it several times a day to meet visitors, get the mail, or grab lunch.  It doesn't lead anywhere too special, and it's not a central route to anywhere in the museum.  The fact that it's not particularly well-travelled makes the worn spot even more special to me.  The stairs are original to the building, and carved from a dense grey stone.  (I'll have to find a docent tomorrow to ask exactly what type of stone it is.  The docents will know, they know everything.)  [ed. According to Dennis, it's limestone, local to the Chicago region. I knew the docents would know!] Right near the railing on the second landing there's a slight depression in the stone right where your foot hits as you turn to continue down the final flight of stairs.  It's not deep--in fact, you can only see it when the lighting hits it just right and reveals that shallow bowl in the stone--but I love it.  I love it because that spot has been worn away by thousands of people walking down these stairs over the last century.  No single person created it, but it's a reminder of our collective existence--a record of our time here at the museum.  This little depression has been caused by the minute scraping of governesses in high boots in the early part of the century, and by shuffling school kids in their shoes that light up when they run.  Folks who came to this museum once left a tiny mark when they went down that stairway, and it's a part of the same mark made by a curator who walked that route every day for 43 years.  Each of us who takes that stairway wears the stone down the tiniest fraction.  Each of us leaves just a little reminder that we were here.

In a building as vast as this one, a building designed to house and explain artifacts from the earliest days of this planet, I take comfort in the fact that there's a tiny record of me here.  When I leave, that worn little scuff will remain, and it will grow minutely as others shuffle down the side stairway.  Most of the people who contribute to it won't notice, but together we've all left a little bit of ourselves behind.  That makes me happy.

And knowing that I'll be leaving here sooner rather than later, I maybe drag my feet a little more than necessary turning 'round that banister...just to leave that tiny fraction more of myself here in this building that's seen so much.

Museum Moment

One of those things that I don't think happens much at other offices:

As I went to drop off the mail this morning I passed an 8-year-old boy in his summer camp uniform singing Alicia Keys at the top of his lungs as he wandered through the Egypt exhibit.  ("NO one, NO one, NO OOONNNEEEEE...")

"exciting" "developments"

I bought a new camera today, one of those fancy jobbers where you can change the focus and the settings on your own.  It's one of the most expensive single purchases I've ever made, but I think it will be worth it. I'm looking forward to some great images of the museum where I work, remembrances before I move away in a few weeks.  I've always wanted to be able to take pictures that show things the way they look to me...

So, yes, exciting for me, but probably not you, dear [non-existent] reader.  In the meantime, you can chew on this.  Is she right?  Do real museums require dinosaurs?

Hi, World.

Hi there.  My name is Beth, and I'm a lover of museums. 

I love the musty smell when you walk in to them, I love seeing little kids scream with joy and run towards dinosaur fossils, I love the way you can get so lost in learning about things you'd never thought about before that you accidentally skip lunch [this happened to me today.  I'm hungry, but I know so much more about Mexican nacimientos!  Totally worth it].  I love watching people stand in front of a painting silently while other patrons walk past.  I love when you find that corner of a museum that's quiet and empty and you feel like you're getting a personal letter from the past that's just for you.  I love tiny little museums in the middle of nowhere that expose a tiny facet of the world that would otherwise be lost to you.  

Really, museums are just awesome.

So this little blog is my love letter to those bastions of art and history and science that help us learn and grow as people and as cultures.  I'm not quite sure yet how it will shape up, but it's bound to include stories from my travels, my job (I'm lucky enough to work in a museum.  I have to walk past a T.rex to get lunch every day--how lucky am I, right?), and my research and pokings about in books and articles and the internets.

I'm sort of excited to see where this goes.