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?)
