Dime museums

The term "dime museum" is new to me, and it was chance that brought it to my notice - having printed on the reverse of some used paper, I looked to see what was on the back - it was an artwork (artist not named) entitled "Austin & Stone", with a couple of banners in the background, on one of which was printed Austin & Stone's Museum.

Museum is currently my hot topic, and quick research found that this museum was a freak show, "the best known and most successful museum in America" - with branches in Paris and London - the London branch being a stone's throw from where I'm sitting typing: 112 Elthorne Road, Hernsey [sic] Rise.

Hmm, more than a stone's throw away, more like a 15-minute walk ... and not Hornsey Rise, either, though there's an Elthorne Park there, and the road originally ran almost that far. The Birkbeck Tavern would have been nearby, at 119 (it's now residential). Also on Elthorne Road, and of related interest, is the Islington Education Artefects Library, with over 50,000 objects to loan to schools.

Back to the dime museum though - these were popular in the US at the end of the 19th century, and were centres of entertainment and moral education for the working class. "Variety, comedy, drama; freaks, curios, illusions" it says on the banner-head of the museum's programme, and also "music, aquaria, aviary". A cabinet of curiosities, in effect, sensationally served, all for only 10 cents admission.

A re-created dime museum, the American Dime Museum, closed down in 2007 after only eight years of existence in a tumbledown storefront in Baltimore. The original American Museum was founded by P T Barnum in 1841 - it was "edutainment," and it was successful. The dime museums that sprouted up in the its wake thrived on sensationalism and showcased a vast array of curiosities and oddities -- some of them real, many of them little more than products of a taxidermist’s fanciful imagination and bucket of left-over parts. By 1865, when the American Museum burned down, dime museums were a fixture of circuses and traveling carnivals. 

"From a history of the dime museums to a history of the creation and manufacture of the items in the museums, The American dime Museums proves to be a hands-on, first-person style record of populist history. Even though most of the dime museum oddities were proven to be fakes and forgeries, [the director of the American Dime Museum] still regards them as worthwhile pieces of history, both as an example of the types of things Americans wanted to believe maybe existed, as well as examples of genuine folk art." says an article written about the last day of the museum's existence. Another article is here, and the items up for auction are here.

But it too arose from its grave, being recreated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, "with Living and Preserved Specimens of both the Natural and UnNatural World we live in. Featuring an Exclusive Menagerie of Infant Animals of North America, Pexcho's American Dime Museum in 2011 now contains Wonders and Curiosities that cannot be found anywhere else on the Planet Earth.
"What began with "Curiosity Cabinets" in wealthy homes in the late 19th century has now evolved into a Living Document and Testament to a nearly forgotten past and a hopeful future, where "normal" is the oddity. Peter Excho has revived and rebooted the American Dime Museum for the next generation of Doubters, Gawkers and Non-Believers, preserving and displaying Truly Wonderful, Exotic, Rare and Fantastic Anomalies that occur and exist around us still to this day." says wikipedia.

Here's an interesting historical note, from a review of a book on the topic published in 1997: " The roots of the dime museum's mixture of education and amusement lie in America's first museums of the late 18th century. Without endowments, early museums, such as Charles Willson Peale's American museum in Philadelphia, frequently included entertainment to draw more people in to see the collections of scientific displays and listen to lectures on natural history and art. These early museums gave way to alternate institutions: the endowed museum as a site of scientific learning (such as the Smithsonian, founded in 1841) and the dime museum, a commercial venue of entertainments with only half-hearted (and often deliberately deceptive) educational ideals."

According to that book, "dime museum pioneers such as Barnum shaped a novel institution in American popular entertainment: a collection of diverse entertainments under one roof that was accessible to families of diverse classes."

Dime museums were immersed in the social issues of the second half of the nineteenth century. The plays in their theaters frequently advocated moral reforms, such as temperance, and museum exhibits, such as Barnum's "half-man-half-monkey" displays, were linked with scientific questions of the day, namely new theories of evolution.

Competition from vaudeville and film led to the decline of the dime museum. Its traces linger, the author (Andrea Stulman Dennett) contends, in the talk show and the tattoo parlour.

Another type of American museum of the time is typified by the Eden Museé. It was patterned after European waxworks, like Madame Tussaud's, and also offered a "winter garden" with refreshments and an orchestra and, in the evening, exotic dancers, lady fencers, conjurers, illusionists, even motion pictures.  

The Eden Museé, New York, in 1900; the building was demolished in 1915 (via)

An account of what might have been a visit to Austin & Stone's museum, led by Professor Hutchings, who worked at the museum from 1881 till his death in 1911, is here. It includes a sampling of the unfortunate freaks and collected curiosities.

The chance find that started the research

Poetry Thursday - Happiness by Raymond Carver

Happiness

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

(from The Writer's Almanac)

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) was a major force in revitalising the short story in America. "Happiness" was published in Poetry magazine in 1985, and his poems appeared every year thereafter until 1990. " Edna Longley comments in the London Review of Books that 'all his writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt.' He explores tortured marriages and strained familial relationships, all of which lead him bravely into discussing his own terminal illness" says this biography.

Developing practice course - session 3

"What is a museum" is the question we considered throughout the day, led by Ian Tucknott. By the end of the day many of us wondered if we'd now be able to look at museums without a degree of cynicism...

In small groups, we came up with various aspects: a destination; a meeting place; a collection of objects, that are significant (how is significance produced, who decides value) and communicate experience (might that experience change over time?); an organised space (in terms of objects, people, and knowledge); guardianship/stewardship; preservation, display; a powerhouse; a brand; connections to systems of power.

Working in small groups

Lots to think about already - my notes of Ian's exposition are brief but include "a space for cultural production", "hidden decisions"  and "the museum represents, thus produces meaning". Foucault got a mention or two - in terms of ideologies "flowing through" institutions, and for his neat  (too neat?) categorisaton of  epistemes, moments in history: Renaissance, neoclassical, modern, for considering the development and changing role of museums.

Again in small groups, we considered four paradigms for museums, based on Janet Marstine's introduction to New Museums Theory and Practice (2006) - museum as shrine, market driven industry, colonising, post-museum - thinking of the characteristics and giving an example or two of actual museums in each category.

Absorbing

By now my notes on Ian's synthesis of the 20th century cultural critique were infused with a twinge of cynicism: "oppressive space of control and power", "cathedrals for cultural and commercial imperialism", "elitism - collusive and prejudiced spaces", "department stores" - even "dead spaces", which is how Robert Smithson thought of museums.

What about "alternative" museums? Globalised 'super' art institutions like the Louvre and Guggenheim with outposts in Abu Dabi; Meschac Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art (recently shown at Tate Modern); Womanhouse in Los Angeles, started in 1972 by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro; Maurizio Cattelan's "Wrong Gallery".

At the break, in the caf - Rose's water bottle from Switzerland

In small groups we deconstructed the museum, looking at physical features, kinds of spaces, tools-technologies-equipment, and function/role. Important words and phrases arising in Ian's elucidation: framing; creating the encounter - through atmosphere, isolation from the real world, architecture etc.

Again in small groups, we read policy documents of different museums, looking at their aims, thinking, ideology, connections.

At the end of the day we watched a slideshow of artists whose work comprised or included institutional critique:
- Joan Fontecuberta (Fauna, also known as "Dr. Ameisenhaufen's Fauna" or "Secret Fauna", challenges the notion of "scientific truth" - video here)
-Hans Haacke (his exposés include Manhatten Real Estate Holdings, 1971)

Haacke's Manhatten Real Estate Holdings (via)

-Dove Bradshaw (in Performance 1976 she appropriated a fire hose by putting a museum label beside it; now the work is a postcard sold in the museum shop)

Bradshaw's Performance (via)

-Andrea Fraser (Museum Highlights (1989) is a gallery talk of deadpan parody, drawing attention to incidental items and showing how tour guides act as frames)

"Jane Castleton" giving a gallery talk (via)

-Fred Wilson (post-colonial perspective, eg Mining the Museum 1992)

Wilson included slave chains among the metalwork (via)

-Michael Asher (names works after the gallery, makes highly site-specific interactions, eg in Claire Copley Gallery he removed a wall to reveal the office space)

Asher's Claire Copley Gallery (via)

-Maria Eichhorn ( ‘Money at Kunsthalle Bern’ was an exploration of the structures that enable an exhibition space to function)
-Goshka Macuga (in 2009 the Whitechapel showed The Nature of the Beast, a restaging of the Guernica tapestry that had been returned to the museum)

By then it was all swimming in front of our eyes, rather --- time to go home! (Next time: "What does 'audience' mean to you?")

But at home there was no escape from museums - that evening Tony and I watched a "Meet the Ancestors" programme that revisited two archaeological finds from the Stone Age (about 5000 years ago), one in Dorset and one in Orkney. (If you're quick you can see the show here, on the BBC iplayer - it disappears shortly after midnight on Thurs 14 Nov.)

The find in Dorset, at Cranborne Chase (right on the edge of the Dorset cursus), was made in 1997 by a farmer turned archaeologist, Martin Green at Down Farm. Aerial photographs of his farm showed interesting markings -

and he decided to investigate, clearing the area down to chalk -

The dig found four skeletons, a woman aged about 30 and three children. The bones were investigated in various ways, including with the fairly new technique of isotope analysis, which revealed that only one of the children was hers. ("So much of archaeology is what happens after excavation.")

Martin Green, a very professional amateur archaeologist, keeps a private museum in a chicken shed, shown at about the 9 minute mark on the programme,

and the bones of all the burials are now part of that museum (do they "belong" to him because they were found on his land?). Certainly he's aware of the responsibility of looking after them, and his own family history of farming links him to these neolithic farmers - "it's a way of understanding the landscape, a continuation of telling that story." (He's written about it, too.)

As you can see, it looks like a "proper" museum, items laid out and labelled, boxes kept tidily on shelves, etc - these are local finds, but some of the items were made, all those thousands of years ago, further afield.

The presenter of the programme dealt with the issue of whether such bones should be reburied. "The excavation site has been returned to agriculture, but of course without the human remains that our ancestors intended to rest here," said the voiceover; then Julian Richards explains:

"I know some people really get quite uneasy about the whole idea of digging up human remains; I don't have a problem with it personally, provided it's done with great care and respect, but what I do feel strongly about it that once we have dug up these remains we ought to keep them, we ought to look after them so that we can study them in the future, because science is developing all the time and there are things that we can do now that we couldn't do 10 years ago, and it's always going to develop. If we rebury those remains we're going to deny ourselves the opportunity of doing that, we've actually denied the possibility of those ancestors telling their story."

Stitches, and book production, from the 1930s

Mary Thomas's Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches has been mentioned before (here, in relation to cross stitch). The book is still in print (latest edition 1998), but much altered.  I love my 1934 edition, with the quirky little pictures - here are some pages with those caricatures, along with some stitches you might want to try sometime (click on image to enlarge) -

Parisian stitch, Pearl stitch tricky!], Pekinese stitch, Petal stitch

Pekinese stitching

Square ground stitch, Star filling, Star stitch, and some star and stem gazing

The stitch diagrams are clear - drawn in a pre-digital time, of course. They number 305, and were first stitched by Miss Dorothy Goslett, then drawn by Miss Margaret Agutter, who also did the charming vignettes - I haven't counted them, but there are certainly over 100. Laying out the page around them may have stretched some compositor's ingenuity (or patience) in the typesetting. The canvas stitches, each with its background of double threads, were drawn by Miss Kay Kohler, who may have got very tired of drawing and re-drawing that grid for each one, back in the days when each illustration had to be presented to the printer in a pristine format - no quick digital printouts incorporating the latest revision!

The book was "Made and Printed in Great Britain by The Camelot Press, London and Southampton" - The Camelot Press (not to be confused with the Camelot Press in Chicago, started by typographer Frederic Goudy in the 1894) was still going in 1974, a quick search shows. The book was published, though, by Hodder & Stoughton - who started the "Teach Yourself..." series, which included this -

Blog stats

On the various pages of statistics that Blogger provides, I found a list of the keywords search through which people get to the blog. Fascinating - I've been sampling it for the past few weeks. Usually the top term will have several hits and the ones near the end of the list just one or two.

It's interesting to see some of the same terms coming up again and again - notably Cy Twombley, blue, and kintsukuroi -

Starting again with sewing kits

In order to give myself a deadline, I signed up for a local xmas craft fair next month (more details later) - it's an experiment .... No idea whether it will be financially worth while, but it gives me an impetus to be doing something productive in the studio, rather than sifting through piles of fabric and unfinished projects, unable to decide to throw them out and get rid of a little of the burden of "use me, finish me" that can get in the way of new (and meaningful) work.

I had forgotten how long it takes to make the selection decisions for each sewing kit. It's taken an hour to come up with just one ensemble, and I'm still not sure about which ribbon to use -

Fabrics for the inside are at top, for the outside at bottom

The process is easy to describe -- I rootle through my big box of suitable fabrics and choose 13 or so for each sewing kit, configuring the outside according to the size of the scraps. In any session I gather fabrics for several items, then start the next day by sewing them up, which fortunately takes less time than the fabric selection, in fact is quite routine.

What would make the fabric-choosing quicker, of course, is some sort of production-line mode - make each outside to the same pattern and cut standard-size pieces of a limited range of fabrics - but where's the fun in that?

The aim is to make another two dozen in the next four weeks; six a week seems little enough. Some (a dozen?) are already on hand; as backup I have various "travel bags" [could make more of those] and some tee-shirts printed with my travelwriting lines.

I'd also like to make some little (A7 size) books to sell at a very reasonable price, either a set with half a dozen recipes using a "theme" ingredient in each, or a book with some embroidery stitches shown on its half-dozen pages. They'll be a variation of the "secret book", printable on one sheet of A4 paper each, and will have jolly, bright covers, possibly made from xmas wrapping paper.

For the possible stitch book, aimed at beginners, I thought the stitches included - one per page - would be chain stitch, cross stitch, french knots, stem stitch/back stitch, blanket stitch, and running stitch on the same page with "how to thread a needle".

Having set out the programme, I'm wondering if this is such a good idea - but it's an experiment, it's an experiment...!

Contemporary stained glass - Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool has worked as a painter for 30 years or so; stained glass is a new medium for him. He was commissioned to make five windows for this church in La-Charite-sur-Loire, France, or rather, for the low white extension on the right -

Here's an interior view of what he came up with -

The structural lines of the leading are an extension of the loopy lines of spray-paint he's been using. Apparently the most difficult decision was whether to add colour - but the colour certainly seems to bring the windows to life.

The fabrication was not done by Wool; he developed the design in collaboration with Pierre-Alain Parot.

A book on the project, from which these pictures come, is available (in French).

These windows caught my interest because of another set of contemporary windows, by Pierre Soulages, which I saw in a book some years ago (and which got me interested in Soulages' work - he's known as "the painter of black"). He did 95 windows at the Abbey of Conques. Those are about "black, thickness, and rhythm" - which can to some extent be said about Wool's windows.

Other contemporary stained glass of note is Gerhard Richter's big window in Cologne Cathedral (72 colours), and the mostly-blue/gold windows in the small church at Tudeley by Marc Chagall.

Monday miscellany

Winner of the World Photomicrography Competition - it's a diatom - or rather, lots of diatoms in a colony -

photo by Wim van Egmond (via)

An exhibition missed at the beginning of the year - "The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein" was at the Queen's Gallery till 14 April. This review, with many images, fills the gap; it includes larger versions of these Dürer portraits - I love how carefully he draws (and paints) hair, fur, and cloth -

Philip Melanchthon and Willibard Pirckheimer by Albrecht Dürer

Around town -

Alleyway in Soho 

Railway bridge, Primrose Hill

Downtown at twilight

 Half term for the kiddies -

Magic mushrooms at Kew Gardens

Exploring jawbones at Grant Zoology Museum

Blood on Paper, text on textiles

The Blood on Paper exhibition at the V&A in 2008 was what got me interested in book arts again - particularly memorable are Anselm Kiefer's huge books, the pages from a book by Chillida, and Cai Guo Qiang's "firework", shown here. (The thumbnails on the V&A page are clickable for more info on them, and there's an essay by the curator here.)

"Danger" by Cai Guo Qiang (via)

When I started doing the "travelwriting" on my tube and bus journey, I started thinking about "the merging of text and image" - how the names of the stations or stops fit into the line drawing. When text appears on textiles, I feel that text takes over and am suspicious of using it (nor do I like my coffee mug to say COFFEE) - but books are a different medium, in fact they are vehicles for text (and/or images). Their purpose is arguably to be read.

At the Tate's Gauguin exhibition in 2010, seeing the pineapple pattern on the blue skirt was almost like reading the word "pineapple" - I simply couldn't get beyond the "word" to look at the rest of the picture. Yet seen on the actual fabric (rather than in a painting), it would have been simply a pattern element.

Of course we "read" images just as we read words - they stand for, indicate, and signify certain things, depending on context, culture, personal meanings. All rather complicated.... you can be sure that plenty has been written about this matter.

And when we read, we want to be able to understand the stories the words are telling - we don't want the words themselves to take over, to become like earworms, or to have meanings that are secret and exclude us.

Every object has a story

The "small collection of objects of personal significance or interest" we took to the first session of the "Developing practice for makers through museums" course, has led to lots of thinking about the significance of objects, their role as receptacles for memory.

This tableau is full of such objects, things used every day to the point where they don't get noticed any more. It's only when one of these useful, commonplace things breaks, when someone "injures" them, or if it inexplicably disappears that we become aware of them. [Is this a metaphor for our relations with the people in our lives? Scary thought.]

Unpicking the associations, the stories -

- plates bought, unexpectedly, at the Natural History Museum one Sunday after we'd been to see an exhibition of huge photos in the outdoor space - there were five plates left, and I wish I'd bought the fifth, in case of breakage ... the birds also remind me of flocks of birds circling the train station in Amsterdam, seen with my young son on one easter holiday, and of the "sky birds" piece I made for the exhibition in Slough

-pepper mill from Ikea, tedious to fill, but grinds well - and how difficult is it to find a decent pepper grinder!

-salt bowl was made in pottery class during foundation art course (I'll spare you the technical details)

-tablecloth brought back from Tanzania by Thomas and Sarah ... that would be three years ago, or four?  It fits perfectly on the table, and the turmeric I spilt on it disappeared almost completely after a few washings

-chairs from Ikea are very comfortable but the "strings" came untied quickly - visiting friend made short work of tying them up again and the ones she fixed have stayed fixed for some years! These chairs are good for drying laundry, too

-salad servers were bought with my first John Lewis reward points - they came in a wooden box, cost £20 [extravagant!] and I love the one red, one orange handle

-cutlery was a present from Aunt Else in Germany, for my "hope chest" (in an age when ordinary girls had such a thing); I polish it on new year's eve, usually. My mother had quite a few pieces as well, so that's in a cupboard somewhere. Polishing silver is something I like to do.

-brown bowl came from a Goodwill shop in Calgary, so that would be 1977, and cost 75 cents. It's not mass produced and has been with me in Halifax, NS, and Oxford, as well as London, so it's taken part in many meals and seen many people

-white bowl is a recent charity shop find ... I've having a little obsession with odd-shaped, solid coloured crockery

- blue chinese bowl is a replacement in 2003 by the Pollard family of a broken bowl that I loved at the time but now cannot recall - but I think fondly of the donors every time I use the new bowl

- little red colander is a companion for the big green colander, which was one of my first purchases for this "new" flat in 1994

Pictures are objects too - after the hall was painted, we had a rehang. To you, they would be interesting or boring, pleasant or negligible - to me they are more than their surface: they represent different times in my life, different situations in which they were acquired, different reasons for being there. Going past them several times in a day, I don't notice them - but I'm not ready to part with them.

Magic and maths

Last week we went to the "Maths and Computing Magic Show" - an illustrated talk by Peter McOwan, who has been doing magic tricks since he was 10, and is now a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London ... an interesting combination of skills.

The magic&maths shows are one of the science outreach programmes he's involved in. You can bet this catches the imagination of schoolkids - I felt like one myself, watching the tricks and hearing about how they were done and the maths behind them, and what other applications that maths has.

Do try this at home

For instance, the Princess Card Trick, first performed by Harry Hardin in 1905. In its simplest manifestation, The magician show packet of cards, normally four or five cards. The spectator is requested to mentally remember one of the card . The cards are then turned back towards viewers and the magician pockets a single card. The faces of the remaining cards are shown and magically the spectator chosen card is gone. What we saw, adapted to a powerpoint presentation, was a shot of 6 cards - then, a shot of five cards and one lying face down, torn up. Yes, everyone agreed the missing card was the one they'd chosen - amazing!

But ... though the cards in the second shot looked like the original cards - 6s, 7s, 8s in red and black - they were not the very same cards as in the first lot, so of course the chosen card was missing!

What this demonstrates is how the brain completes a pattern, how visual attention takes short cuts - the data shown (the exact cards, number and suite) is too much to take in perfectly at a glance, it must be compressed. By needing to focus on the one card, this reading of the data is even more difficult. So the viewer is tricked ... but isn't this how any magic trick works?

The practical application of what's going on in that card trick is in MP3 players. Your brain does some data compression - and the same sort of compression is at work to fit a lot of info into an MP3 data file (for the record, it's explained here). Your brain gets enough info without having to process all the data in a complete file - because it would be ignoring some of it anyway.

Peter McOwan demonstrated some other tricks, with participation of volunteers from the audience, keeping us guessing as to how some were done. Here are some links for downloading free books and tricks -

http://www.mathematicalmagic.com/

http://www.cs4fn.org/magic/

http://www.qmul.ac.uk/mathsmagic/

http://www.illusioneering.org/

This event was part of the Inside Out Festival 2013, which was organised by The Culture Capital Exchange. The festival will be returning for a fifth year in October 2014.

One trick Peter McOwan didn't do was to saw a woman in half - but he mentioned that this trick was first performed in Finsbury Park - this was in January 1921 at the Empire Theatre , and the practitioner was one P.T. Selbit (who had changed his name from Tommy Tibbles). Selbit's version was Sawing Through a Woman (not sawing her in half), but it gave rise to the later versions. Here he is at work -

Who would have thought that "magic" has a history ... but then, doesn't everything have a history?

Drawing as restoration

Teresa Whitfield re-creates lace through drawing it, thread by thread. She is "collecting" lace objects (held in museum collections), most recently those owned by Victorian women authors. By drawing them she not only reconstructs the object (in much the dame way it was made), but this construction process also references the painstaking work of writing a book.

The drawing of Charlotte Bronte's shawl measures 62 x 100 cm - it is life size, but has no evidence of the deterioration that has afflicted the actual shawl. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) had tiny handwriting - rather like the thin threads used to make the shawl.

Manuscript book by Charlotte Bronte (via)

Teresa Whitfield is exhibiting 25 of her drawings at Somerset Rural Life Museum (Glastonbury) until 14 December. The exhibition includes the Bronte shawl.