[travel] Museum of a museum
May. 17th, 2009 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellWhen my friends from home visited in Turkey, we had a whole long conversation about how cool it would be for future archaeologists to uncover a 20th-century museum, and place blurbs on the old blurs explaining 20th century museum customs.
In Warsaw the Communists had turned the main cathedral into a Museum of Atheism. When the Russians were kicked out in 1989, the church unsurprisingly got the cathedral back. I'm a bit sad though... I wish I could have seen what a Russian museum of atheism looked like.
Well, I did finally get to see a museum of a museum in the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. Back in the 1930s, one section of the building had been set up a a museum of some family that lived in some castle. This exhibit was closed for several decades but not taken down. Eventually, enough time had passed that the way the objects were exhibited became interesting, so they reopened it unchanged as a museum of 1930s era museum practices.
The exhibits were crammed close together like a grandmother's living room and very light on description... in fact, almost evety exhibit simply had a number on the cabinet. People at the time either had pamphlets or were shown around by a curator. I imagine it was something akin to wandering through the personal collection of an old professor, with the professor stopping every few seconds to say things like “now this is a most extraordinary find... the Hussite peoples in the 12th century were ...”
There's something a lot more interesting and closer to home for most of you. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles looks and acts like a museum but it's actually an art piece exploring the nature of the museum experience, the act of imbibing information, and the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. The subect matter of the exhibits is interesting, only partially true, and somewhat irrelevant to the point of the experience.
In Warsaw the Communists had turned the main cathedral into a Museum of Atheism. When the Russians were kicked out in 1989, the church unsurprisingly got the cathedral back. I'm a bit sad though... I wish I could have seen what a Russian museum of atheism looked like.
Well, I did finally get to see a museum of a museum in the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. Back in the 1930s, one section of the building had been set up a a museum of some family that lived in some castle. This exhibit was closed for several decades but not taken down. Eventually, enough time had passed that the way the objects were exhibited became interesting, so they reopened it unchanged as a museum of 1930s era museum practices.
The exhibits were crammed close together like a grandmother's living room and very light on description... in fact, almost evety exhibit simply had a number on the cabinet. People at the time either had pamphlets or were shown around by a curator. I imagine it was something akin to wandering through the personal collection of an old professor, with the professor stopping every few seconds to say things like “now this is a most extraordinary find... the Hussite peoples in the 12th century were ...”
There's something a lot more interesting and closer to home for most of you. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles looks and acts like a museum but it's actually an art piece exploring the nature of the museum experience, the act of imbibing information, and the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. The subect matter of the exhibits is interesting, only partially true, and somewhat irrelevant to the point of the experience.
