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imomusYesterday I went to the Natural History Museum for the second time in a month. I'm writing an article for AIGA Voice about the museum's geological layers of graphic design; what's wonderful is that, while celebrating diverse historical eras and geographical regions, the museum is also narrating these stories with wildly divergent voices.
One room (Peoples of Polynesia) will be done out in 1970s graphics, colours and shapes, the next (dinosaurs) will be 90s, the next (stuffed animals in fantastical dioramas) 1930s. What's tragic about this museum, though, is that every species it shows, every traditional way of life it documents, seems to be endangered by the selfishness and "success" of the very people wandering about it.
What I love are rooms dealing with forgotten, neglected peoples, themselves decorated in forgotten, neglected styles from forgotten, neglected decades. Rooms where we see a confrontation between a queer and crazy Western style that no longer looks "natural" and a queer and crazy civilisation. Rooms that are cul-de-sacs, hardly visited, humming and juddering with faulty air conditioning, jumping to life with ethnic music and serious, boring ethnographic films. Museums all over the world, assuming they haven't been spoiled by too much money, tend to have these sad, beautiful rooms, rooms filled with a poetry of neglect, anthropology, decor, oddness, wildly lovely music and evocatively clunky graphic design.
I'm attracted to the rooms dealing with people more than the ones dealing with animals. And of course it's North and East Asia which really tug my heart strings. I'm in love with Mongoloid cultures. I love them like a lover loves his beloved. I'm irresistibly drawn to them, to the entire family. I butterfly about, reading the panels out of context, out of order, skipping from one civilisation to the next, disorienteering, revelling in sheer difference. "Two brothers own a limited herd of yaks in common," I read. "The elder brother is married. If the younger brother moves away, he can take nearly half the herd with him as his share. Because each brother would then have few yaks, the two agree to stay together. This arrangement requires the elder brother's wife to marry the younger brother as well. Thus she has two husbands and the property of the household remains intact." I also learn that the Chukchee -- look, they occupy the tiny northeastern corner of the Asian continent, a red corner of your brain you've never visited! -- share with the Eskimo the harpoon, the kayak, the sledge and snow-goggles, and like the Eskimo use the bow-drill for fire-making and boring holes, the semilunar woman's knife, the lamp and the sinew-backed bow.
I gravitate, of course, to Japan. And learn that the Ise shrine -- can there be anything in the world more beautiful than the Ise shrine? -- is rebuilt every twenty years. Nature doesn't let things moulder away, but renews them. And so the priests at Ise build a new version of Japan's most sacred building alongside the current "original", ready to be switched when the time comes. The building is always changing, yet always the same. I also learn (from a tastefully restrained, diagrammatic display using Franklin Gothic, circa 1967) that "Japanese houses, traditionally of wood, paper and bamboo, are now more often made of other materials. Still, traditional elements remain, such as the use of unpainted wood, sliding translucent doors and conventional room sizes. The house and its surrounding gardens are also treated as an organic whole; wherever possible, rooms open to the outside so that natural views can be seen... From the 16th century on, the developing tea cult, which strongly emphasizes simplicity, has influenced the Japanese household. Furniture is kept to a minimum, matresses rolled up and stored during the day and shoes left at the door. Though cold in winter, its openness and flexibility make this house one of the most graceful manmade shelters."
Ah, simplicity, I love it when you're strange!
One room (Peoples of Polynesia) will be done out in 1970s graphics, colours and shapes, the next (dinosaurs) will be 90s, the next (stuffed animals in fantastical dioramas) 1930s. What's tragic about this museum, though, is that every species it shows, every traditional way of life it documents, seems to be endangered by the selfishness and "success" of the very people wandering about it.
What I love are rooms dealing with forgotten, neglected peoples, themselves decorated in forgotten, neglected styles from forgotten, neglected decades. Rooms where we see a confrontation between a queer and crazy Western style that no longer looks "natural" and a queer and crazy civilisation. Rooms that are cul-de-sacs, hardly visited, humming and juddering with faulty air conditioning, jumping to life with ethnic music and serious, boring ethnographic films. Museums all over the world, assuming they haven't been spoiled by too much money, tend to have these sad, beautiful rooms, rooms filled with a poetry of neglect, anthropology, decor, oddness, wildly lovely music and evocatively clunky graphic design.
I'm attracted to the rooms dealing with people more than the ones dealing with animals. And of course it's North and East Asia which really tug my heart strings. I'm in love with Mongoloid cultures. I love them like a lover loves his beloved. I'm irresistibly drawn to them, to the entire family. I butterfly about, reading the panels out of context, out of order, skipping from one civilisation to the next, disorienteering, revelling in sheer difference. "Two brothers own a limited herd of yaks in common," I read. "The elder brother is married. If the younger brother moves away, he can take nearly half the herd with him as his share. Because each brother would then have few yaks, the two agree to stay together. This arrangement requires the elder brother's wife to marry the younger brother as well. Thus she has two husbands and the property of the household remains intact." I also learn that the Chukchee -- look, they occupy the tiny northeastern corner of the Asian continent, a red corner of your brain you've never visited! -- share with the Eskimo the harpoon, the kayak, the sledge and snow-goggles, and like the Eskimo use the bow-drill for fire-making and boring holes, the semilunar woman's knife, the lamp and the sinew-backed bow.
I gravitate, of course, to Japan. And learn that the Ise shrine -- can there be anything in the world more beautiful than the Ise shrine? -- is rebuilt every twenty years. Nature doesn't let things moulder away, but renews them. And so the priests at Ise build a new version of Japan's most sacred building alongside the current "original", ready to be switched when the time comes. The building is always changing, yet always the same. I also learn (from a tastefully restrained, diagrammatic display using Franklin Gothic, circa 1967) that "Japanese houses, traditionally of wood, paper and bamboo, are now more often made of other materials. Still, traditional elements remain, such as the use of unpainted wood, sliding translucent doors and conventional room sizes. The house and its surrounding gardens are also treated as an organic whole; wherever possible, rooms open to the outside so that natural views can be seen... From the 16th century on, the developing tea cult, which strongly emphasizes simplicity, has influenced the Japanese household. Furniture is kept to a minimum, matresses rolled up and stored during the day and shoes left at the door. Though cold in winter, its openness and flexibility make this house one of the most graceful manmade shelters."
Ah, simplicity, I love it when you're strange!
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:36 pm (UTC)Pity you didn't pop into the Hall of Ocean Life (the Whale Room)--my wife and I illustrated all of the identification deck art and keys. Took us seven months to complete. Might have gotten you back behind the scenes, in the fabrication rooms. Ms. Surface worked on that hall as well.
The most unusual instance of the neglected museum aesthetic I've encountered was in Cape Town, with it's huge display cases full of poorly done, slowly disintegrating 19c taxidemy. The animals looked like species from other planets.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:40 pm (UTC)When I lived in Europe, I enjoyed the sturdiness and comfort of the German flat I lived in. I could still 'feel' the winter (and the summer) and today, I do not turn my heat up or my A/C down because I prefer to 'feel' the seasons.
BTW, I found your LJ after reading your Wired article about your 48 minutes on "My Space". I spent about 3 weeks there, and when the creep-meter finally pegged, I bailed out and killed my account. LJ is much more civilized.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:46 pm (UTC)this thing (http://www.naoshima-is.co.jp/art/goou.html), renovated by artist hiroshi sugimoto, is quite beautiful too. the (unusable) crystal staircase descending to a tunnel under the shrine which leads to a thin vertical view of the sea. the shrine itself is wonderfuly simple.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:17 pm (UTC)Now, what do they say? "An untidy desk means an untidy brain, but what does an empty brain mean"?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:26 pm (UTC)I haven't chatted with the designers there in a while, but I do know a few of the design team who worked on the hall, including the art director. Not sure if they have moved on or not, but it shouldn't be hard to find out. In my experience, most museum design departments (Met, AMNH, etc) are full of extremely talented people that are devoted to the institution, although underpaid and overworked. There was talk this time of having a small plaque commemorating everyone who worked on the refurbishments, but it never came about. Most of the artists and sculptors in the exhibition departments seem to have a background in both biology and fine arts. Very humbling. Our dilettantism is what won us the project--all 400 species. We had to put all of our other clients on hold for months.
This last refurbishment erased the errors of past science (they had to add new species and deep sea habitats, and even had to change the position of the blowhole on the blue whale). While this gives me a certain amount of sadness, it makes me wonder what creatures I "got wrong" when illustrating them, since many of the deep-sea creatures only had video footage from ALVIN for a reference (I literally had to play, rewind and re-play on my video player to get the forms down). That said, the dioramas of the ancient sea floors have remained untouched--they were made of wax, plaster and wire armature, instead of cast resins. Their depth of color cannot be matched, except perhaps by the thirty-odd coats on the diorama walls.
We're very proud to have made a small contribution to the project. These last refurbishments will likely remain in place for about thirty years (they found a newspaper clipping of Hitler when they moved some of the diorama displays around during refurbishments).
On opening day, I saw a young boy using our Andros Reef key to learn what a barracuda is. I admit to getting a bit teary-eyed--it was a deeply satisfying moment for an "agnostic druid" like myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:49 pm (UTC)The Musuem of Natural History is my favorite for precisely the reasons you mention. I particularly love the Mongolian rooms.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:50 pm (UTC)Somehow, though, to make sure that never happens, the museum has to see as a virtue its current eclecticism, and I suspect they see it merely as a necessity. I may be wrong, I hope so. The thing about the current chaos of styles is that although it's a beautiful illustration of cultural relativism, it does somewhat undermine the narrative authority of the museum. Like employing, for your documentary voiceover, a dozen actors with different accents and squeaky voices and antequated slang instead of, you know, that guy with the low rumbly voice who does the Hollywood film trailers.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 04:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:12 pm (UTC)i had a similar experience walking through their last summer--finding it as much a museum of itself and its own history as of what was on display. That's the case for all museums, but I think the key to why it's so weird is because a science museum might not be as careful about its aesthetics as an art museum. Thus, the strange, outsider feel to a lot of the design.
I remember there was a sculpture of the different stages of fetal development that I really liked. Mainly what the doctor's hands looked like in the birth part.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 06:00 pm (UTC)My new goal is to be invited to a fabulous party thrown in the Hall of Ocean Life. There is a parquet ballroom floor, after all.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 06:03 pm (UTC)Have you been to the Museum of American Folk Art? They apparently boast a large collection of Henry Darger's work.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 06:46 pm (UTC)I'm just a persnickety character with a brash side that comes out when reading arguments, observations and theories.
I only hate ideas and actions, almost never the people who think or do them. And your ideas aren't even close to the 'hate' category; if it were so, I wouldn't read you.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:11 pm (UTC)You'd likely get very little out of the AMNH staff, anyway, as the museum is intensely bureaucratic and forbids most employees from speaking out of turn, as it were. Technically, I'm supposed to not speak about it either, but the check cleared a long while back, so nyeah.
Been meaning to follow up to see if you're at all interested in that Swindle spread, but I'm sure you're quite busy preparing for your return to Berlin (which I might be visiting on book business, btw). No worries if you prefer to pass; ponciness isn't for everyone, and we each adhere to our respective aesthetic (although I thought your inclusion would serve to expand the definition in the minds of those casually familiar with the subject. I'm dead tired of seeing people play with the same the old tropes instead of engaging in some sort of synthesis).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:22 pm (UTC)I once found a fossilized limpet in the limestone wall of a ceynote cavern in the Yucatan. One of the most surreal diving experiences I ever had: dark blue warbling thermoclines punctuated by columns of light...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:25 pm (UTC)Museum of Jurassic Technology
Date: 2006-05-17 07:40 pm (UTC)Your description of your favorite places in the AMNH was fantastic:
"Rooms that are cul-de-sacs, hardly visited, humming and juddering with faulty air conditioning, jumping to life with ethnic music and serious, boring ethnographic films."
If you get a moment, visit the website for the Museum of Jurassic Technology:
http://www.mjt.org/
It is located in Santa Monica, and you must surely visit it if ever again you find yourself in the Los Angeles area. It is exactly the kind of space that you descibed above...It isn't a true museum though--more like conceptual art, celebrating what it is you seem to love about AMNH and other institutions. Lord Whimsy? You'd love it too, guaranteed ;-)
Cheers,
Winslow
Re: Museum of Jurassic Technology
Date: 2006-05-17 07:43 pm (UTC)W
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 08:01 pm (UTC)hey nick watch this love, bonnie
Date: 2006-05-17 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 09:23 pm (UTC)Re: Museum of Jurassic Technology
Date: 2006-05-17 11:03 pm (UTC)I gleaned that term from a paperrad comic.
Date: 2006-05-18 12:21 am (UTC)It seems as though all of the museum's designers had their own interpretation of neutral, supposedly trend-unconscious design that, with their sound grasp of graphic design principles and classic typographic elements, could conceivably withstand the graphic design trends that follow it.
However, the area of timeless design is also, ironically enough, subject to its own internal trends, and, as such, all of them still have the mark of their respective origins--a "dated timelessness", if you will.
Curators
Date: 2006-05-18 03:03 am (UTC)Here is an essay which touches on his reinterpretation of the collection.
http://www.etribal.com/e/pdf/at05_challenge.pdf
I have not been in NYC for a few years, but as of the date of this article the collection has been "frozen"
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 03:06 am (UTC)I recommend Amsterdam's Kattenkabinet, at 497 Herrengracht.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 08:30 am (UTC)You know how to make a girl weak in the knees!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 05:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 05:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 07:22 pm (UTC)