The Ultimate Specimen

The Manchester Museum Hermit’s blog, webcam and twitter are now online!

For 40 days and 40 nights, artist Ansuman Biswas lives in the Manchester Museum’s secluded Victorian tower, reflecting on issues of collecting, loss and extinction. Here’s a passage from his statement:

I feel a deep dismay at the ecological crisis facing humanity, which I experience as a loss of beauty. And I feel challenged to respond using the full weight of my training as a contemplative and an artist. But, along with this strong agenda, I am also interested in an art which is abstract or open-ended.

This tension between purpose and play is also an essential condition of the hermit, who is introverted but has a social role. I am interested in exploring precisely this ambiguity.

The hermit is conventionally a benign and pious figure, but I also want to invoke his destructive aspect. Artistic precedents for this approach are in the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger and John Latham. Eremetic forerunners include the great Hindu ascetic Shiva, who is celebrated as the destroyer of the world, and the Christian anchorite, Anthony the Great who burned away his wilfulness in order to surrender himself to the will of God. My own hermetic training is in the Theravada Buddhist technique of vipassana.

Vipassana is essentially an exhaustive cataloguing of every aspect of experience, up to and including the cessation of everything. The vipassana yogi, like the Victorian collector, is engaged in taxonomy – a taxonomy of things which are disappearing. Someone practicing vipassana trains his or her awareness on every minute detail of experience, and observes it while it burns away. At the completion of this enlightenment nothing is left. The literal meaning of the Sanskrit word nirvana is ‘extinguishing’, referring to the going out of a light.

Taking leave of the world.

Manchester Museum Hermitage.

For two months this summer, an artist will live in the Manchester Museum’s Victorian Gothic tower 24/7, reflecting upon biodiversity, climate change, sustainability and the future of the planet. The chosen performance artist, writer, poet, visual artist, sculptor or musician will reside in a set of rooms accessed by a steep, windy spiral stone staircase, which are not normally open to the public, after a short period of intense engagement with the Museum’s collections. The only means of staying in touch with the outside world during the whole secluded residency will be by digital or audiovisual media, such as blogging or video statements.

According to the artist brief, the project presents a “unique opportunity to explore a tradition, with a long history and extending across many cultures, of men and women who made the decision to flee the company of their fellow humans to dwell alone in retirement and total solitude, often living on islands, in caves, or in the desert.”

Thus the urban hermit might be a modern Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder, who lived on top of a pillar for 37 years

St. Simeon Stylites.

a contemporary Saint Jerome in his study

Albrecht Dürer, Der heilige Hieronymus im Gehäus, 1514.

or a reincarnation of the poor poet.

Carl Spitzweg, Der arme Poet, 1839.

Also (the Manchester Museum houses a natural history collection, after all):

Hermit crab.

For more information on the project, see artist brief, BBC coverage and Museum website.

Serpent Columns

Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Nîmes. View of the main exhibition room, beginning of 20th century.

From Mark Dion, The Natural History of the Museum, exh. cat., 2007.

Pacific breeze.

Ever since I first heard about the new California Academy of Sciences, designed by Renzo Piano, which opened on September 27, I wanted to go to San Francisco and see for myself. Recent articles are enthusiastic, even ecstatic, describing the building as “environmental marvel” and a “reaffirmation that human history is an upward spiral rather than a descent into darkness.” According to its reviewers, “the greenest museum in the world” “touches the ground with the delicacy of a ballerina” and looks like “a delicate piece of fine embroidery.”

Green, symmetrical, classical?

Floating, undulating, natural?

To me the skylights on the bumps in the roof look like scales or the facets of a fly’s eye…

Lush, complex, energetic?

Light, weightless, transparent?

See New York Times article and slideshow and The Guardian article and slideshow.

Darwin’s beard.

My three favourite exhibits from the Darwin – Big Idea exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, which I had a chance to see last Wednesday:

Pair of mockingbirds which Darwin collected on the Galapagos Islands (never before on public display). Their slight differences inspired Darwin to consider for the first time that species change in time. Aestheticised display, with the birds bedded on a cushion of purple velvet.

Treasure chest which belonged to Darwin’s daughter Etty. It mainly contains mementoes and keepsakes of her father, such as hair from his beard wrapped in tissue.

Darwin’s first sketch of an evolutionary tree of life visualising relationships between organisms (jotted down in Notebook B). Fascinating combination of ‘I think’, diagram, scribbles and notes, suggesting that Darwin developed his ideas visually, via images.

There’s also a neat reconstruction of his study on display, two life specimens (an iguana and a frog), and lots of models to be touched by visitors, or mounted specimens to be looked at through magnifying glasses.

All of this is accompanied by extensive labelling, but it’s worth taking the time to read the many quotes and extracts from letters, notebooks and manuscripts, to not only get an idea of Darwin the scientist, naturalist, collector and traveller, but also of Darwin the hesitant innovator, the obedient son, and the loving husband, father and friend.

My only complaint is that there’s no catalogue, not even a small exhibition leaflet; one is forced, for better or for worse, to read Darwin’s books or Janet Browne’s no doubt fabulous two-volume, 1200 page biography.

Field Notes

One of four postcards sent by Mark Dion to Dr Yoshiaki Nishino at the University of Tokyo Museum in 2002, preparing the exhibition Microcosmographia: Mark Dion’s Chamber of Curiosities.

Wunderkammer des Abendlandes

Pages photographed from exhibition catalogue Wunderkammer des Abendlandes, 1994 (out of print).

Museumification, mummification.

Distorting mirror (‘miroir de sorcière’) from André Breton’s collection of art, ethnographic/oceanic objects, objets trouvés, natural objects and objects of curiosity;

in Breton’s studio at 42, rue Fontaine in Paris in the 1930s (the round object right above his head…);

and as part of the ‘Breton Wall’ at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 2005 (see right lower section of the picture).

Christmassy flower.

Last year around this time I held a rose of jericho in my hand; it felt dead, but strangely elastic. The friendly tour guide at Trausnitz Castle in Bavaria, the partly restored Wittelsbach kunstkammer collection that opened to the public in 2004, had us touch a specimen, no doubt trying to keep the children at bay. I remember thinking, what’s the point? After all she didn’t pour water on it to make it blossom.

But maybe the opportunity to handle the object is the reason why I still remember everything she told us about it: that it is an African desert plant brought to Europe by the Crusaders; that it opens its dead-looking branches and begins to blossom as soon as it is watered; that it was kept in cabinets of curiosities due to its magical, oracular powers (its failure to open symbolised a person’s imminent death); that, according to its Christian symbolism, it was believed to represent the opening of the womb at childbirth, and that it was therefore supposed to blossom only at Christmas.

I loved that damn museum.

Gemsbok diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals,
American Museum of Natural History, NY.

Water Hole diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals.

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

Quoted from J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, chapter 16.

Alaska Brown Bear diorama, Hall of North American Mammals.

Australian diorama (detail: crimson rosellas), Birds of the World Hall.

All pictures from the AMNH website.