Day at the Museum

StraightMan and I are visiting my family in northern NJ. We had parked Beanie and Bubbie with my parents for a few days while we attending the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans.

I know: How lucky are we?!

When we arrived at my parents’ home on Sunday evening, the kids were waiting for us. We have not parted company from them since. I know: How lucky are we.

StraightMan and I, not wanting to wear out our (or especially our kids’) welcome, whisked our family of four into the city for a morning at the American Museum of Natural History. My sister, who lives and works in the city, joined us.

“It’s kind of funny to go to the Museum of Natural History with two anthropologists and their kids,” she remarked to me.

To which I might have said: It’s kind of funny for two anthropologists to go to the AMNH with their kids who have watched “Night at the Museum.” When I say “funny,” I mean not funny-haha, but funny-strange. Or more like funny-mortifying.

“Gum-Gum,” Bubbie declares, his treble pitch bouncing around the august halls of the museum. “I want to see Gum-Gum.”

“Is it Gum-Gum,” Beanie asks at similar volume, then lowers her voice, “or is it Dum-Dum?” She lowers her voice because “Dum-Dum” is like saying “stupid,” which in our family, we have tried to teach our children that we do not use this word to describe people. So, Beanie, being a rather kind kid (also, a goody-goody), feels a bit wary about saying “Dum-Dum.” Especially in front of her parents.

We found Dum-Dum in the Hall of Pacific Peoples. Bubbie had a 10-minute conversation with him. No exaggeration.

It turns out that a lot of kids in the ages 3 and up set have seen the movie - and are taking their parents on a "Night at the Museum" tour.

Other highlights from our “Night at the Museum” tour: Saying hello to Theodore Roosevelt, who is neither made of wax nor of Robin Williams, as in the movie. Seeing the dinosaur that in the movie played fetch in the atrium. Looking for the lions among the African mammals.

However, we did not find Sacajawea or dioramas of the Roman Empire and Manifest Destiny that features miniature likenesses of Owen Wilson – or as Bubbie put it, “little people who talk.”

Beanie, who has a keen interest in non-human primates, was looking for Dexter, the capuchin monkey in the movie who caused such havoc for Ben Stiller.

While viewing the stuffed chimpanzees and gorillas, Beanie asked: “Are they real?” So, I explained that back when the museum had been founded, it had been thought acceptable to hunt “exotic” animals, including monkeys and apes. As we walked through the Hall of Primates, Beanie remarked: “It makes me sad to see that the gorillas had to be dead to be in the museum.”

***

This brings me to the unease that I feel - and that anthropologists today generally feel - about a place like the American Museum of Natural History. For me, the museum is arguably more interesting as an example of the history of science than as a source of "science" itself. It is a place full of relics, but it is itself also a relic of practices and ideas of science in the past.

Yet, if the number of school buses pulling off Central Park West is any indication, the American Museum of Natural History is as popular a destination as ever as a source of "science" for the public. However, it also makes me wonder (or worry) about the state of science education today.

On the one hand, the museum can inspire in kids on a school field trip an interest in anthropology, paleontology, and astronomy. On other hand, how do parents and teachers follow up on a kid's interest, once sparked?

There seems to me a widening gap between what the specialists study (and discuss among themselves in venues like the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association) and what the public learns.

It is not necessarily that the museum provides incorrect information, but I think it is incomplete.

In order for exhibits like the Hall of African Mammals or the Hall of Primates to make sense, there ought to be more contextualization offered: The museum might offer commentary on the museum itself. Like the fact that the "exotic" animals were hunted, stuffed, and donated to the museum. Explaining this past makes the exhibit more, not less valid as an instrument for science education.

Also, I think anthropologists have a stake in a Day at the Museum: Franz Boas, regarded as the "father" of American anthropology, and Margaret Mead, his student and the most famous anthropologist in her time, both served as curators at the museum, so it is a significant site in the production of anthropological knowledge. In fact, there is a rather interesting exhibit on Margaret Mead's career at AMNH in the Hall of Pacific Peoples. It is rather striking that the exhibit includes color photographs of "change" occurring in Melanesia and Polynesia, like a man in "native" dress standing at a fast-food counter. There is otherwise little room in the museum to acknowledge what it means to be, say, Pacific Peoples today. The exhibit is situated, literally, in a passage that leads to the Hall of Pacific Peoples, which I think demonstrates how the architecture of the museum itself can be used to retell the story of the museum and its exhibits.

I think the history of science requires more attention in the American Museum of Natural History, in part because it is part of our cultural history and in part to demystify science as a process not just of discovery, but of revelation that is painstakingly derived, sometimes through reinterpretation.

Art science?

I am not an art historian, nor do I play one on TV, but I have enough hubris to offer the following note about a recent visit to the MOMA to see the exhibit, "Matisse: Radical Invention."

The focus of the show is on paintings that Matisse made between 1913 and 1917 and that were received poorly at the time. The exhibition offers an argument for how and why the paintings were "radical invention" in their time, marking new direction not only in Matisse's work, but also the work of other painters.

What especially interested StraightMan and me was that this re-interpretation of the paintings is based in part on the use of imaging technologies (like X-ray) to trace - or rather, reconstruct - Matisse's process. What did he do to make these paintings, and what likely was he thinking about when he made particular choices (including repainting portions of his canvases)?

As cultural anthropologists, we are partial to "process." It is also a radical invention itself, I think, to apply imaging technologies to "art." Yet, I also wonder whether or not this might be another sign of the "scientization" or "technologization" of yet another arena of thought and experience.

I am not for mystifying art as ahistorical "genius" - I find explanations of literature and art in terms of their structures to be robust: I am not alone in thinking that Pride and Prejudice is interesting not because of the players, but because of the rules of the game itself.

Yet, I also wonder at the significance with which imaging technologies are greeted as giving us the "truth" about Matisse.

***

Pet peeve: Museum goers, put down the phones and the devices transmitting your "audio tour," and just look at what is in front of you.

Because this is what I feel that you are missing, as described by short story writer Deborah Eisenberg (whose Collected Stories is reviewed in the August 16 / 23 issue of The Nation):

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It's as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history - a sensation, really, that's a lot like hope.

The tide is high

Enjoyed the opportunity this past weekend to celebrate my 40th birthday (!) with a whirlwind visit to the city, which I called my home in my 20s. I am happy to report that as good as my 20s were, I am glad to be where I am now, metaphorically and literally. Midlife need not be a crisis.

I figure this is not a bad start to the next half of my life :)

However - and you knew that this was coming - there are more than enough crises brewing around us. Climate change is one, with attendant other crises like the rising of sea levels.

The Museum of Modern Art currently has an exhibition called Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront that I highly recommend viewing.

Five interdisciplinary teams were assigned to design projects for five sites around New York City, including lower Manhattan. The projects addressed ecology / environment in terms of biological, social, and economic concerns - an approach that an anthropologist might call holistic. They considered humans, other animals, plants, water, and other elements. They considered history and future.

Here is a link to the Rising Currents blog.

Still recalling the fresh taste of Wellfleet in my mouth, I have to say, I found a favorite in the Zone 4 oyster-tecture project.

Here is a link to a Bloomberg new service report on oyster-tecture.

***

As an aside, visiting the MOMA, along with visits this summer to the Clark Art Institute and the Corning Museum of Glass, reminded me that the role of museums is not only to preserve the past (even were that possible to do in the first place).

Museums provide us with spaces (and times) where we can imagine. That is the delight and thrill that I first experienced when my parents took me, as a grade schooler, to the American Museum of Natural History - I liked looking at the gems - and the Metropolitan Museum of Art - I liked the arms and armament, the musical instruments, and the rooms of period furniture.

Some parents instill in their kids a love of sport or craft or the great outdoors. Not being athletic or skillful myself, I suppose I might be handing along, at least, a love of museums and the recognition that they ought to be places where possibilities become re-presented to us (and not just go there to die)...

I think E.L. Konigsburg captured what is wonderful about museums so well in a book that I especially loved at that age, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I plan to share with Beanie. When she is finished reading that classic horse tale, Misty of Chincoteague.