Adam Savage talks objects and stories and I love it.

I'm pausing briefly from my deeper ponderings re: artifacts and artifice to look at the issue from another angle.  And to be honest, life has kept me from reading The Same Ax, Twice, and I think I'll be able to continue my thoughts much more eloquently once I’ve got a little more grist for my mental mill.

So, in the course of mucking about on the internet recently I stumbled across this TED talk that Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave back in 2008.  (Yes, I am once again really late to the party.) I sort of love Mythbusters, and have always been taken with Adam’s outright enthusiasm for everything that he does.  He’s certainly skilled and intelligent, but I am most drawn to the way that he seems to be generally delighted with everything he learns and does.  (As he should be – the man gets to both do awesome in-depth period research and blow things up on the regular.)  I find him to be a very engaging speaker, largely because his enthusiasm is completely contagious.  This talk is a great example of it, and I encourage you to take 15 minutes and watch the whole thing.

Can’t watch the video?  The transcript is available on the TED site.

So this is different take on replicas, for sure – these are replicas for art’s sake, for personal pleasure, and the sense of accomplishment.  Adam’s attention to detail and commitment to his projects is both endearing and admirable.  But what I find even more compelling about this talk is the overarching theme: the stories that objects tell.  Go back and listen to the first section again, where he first talks about the dodo:  “I became obsessed with the object -- not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together -- there's an entire story here.”

That phrase clicked in my head as soon as I heard it, and was reinforced by everything else he said.  That, right there, is why museums are important, and why original objects are important.  I'm learning that there’s definitely a place for replicas in the museum world, but with the original object, you can see the story.  Not just the story of the dodo bird or the T.rex or the rare book, but of the many hands that preserved that object, the scientists and historians that studied it.  Each museum artifact actually tells two stories – the story of the artifact itself, and its inherent significance, and the story of the people who took that artifact, excavated it, preserved it, and put it on display.  Much like older museums are both museums that preserve the history of their collections and the history of museums as a thing in its own right, an artifact on display is many things at once.

Adam Savage is right: an object is many things to many people, but each one of those things is a story.  Adam’s dodo skeleton and Maltese Falcon are wonderful objects, and his efforts give them a story that is worth telling—but it’s not the story of the dodo or the Maltese Falcon, it’s the story of Adam Savage trying really hard to make something.  Those stories are important, in their own way, but I still believe that the original object captures stories in a way that no replica ever will.