Behind the Scenes Tours, May 16th and 17th

Another lap around the Sun, the buds of spring are opening, and so are the creaky doors of the Zymoglyphic Museum, shaking off the rust of winter hibernation, letting in a bit of fresh air to shift the dust around and dilute the musty aromas, ready to welcome visitors. You can tour the museum, meet the curator, and go behind the scenes to see where exhibits are created (some allege that the artifacts themselves are concocted there as well). A foretaste of the exhibit preparation area is show below, sorry evidence of the inhuman conditions under which museum personnel are expected to labor.

New this year will be a small exhibit of viewing stone photographs. The museum shop will have a limited number of the new Museum Guides available for purchase. You will also be able to visit on site the studio of Judith Hoffman and delight in her artist books, metal sculpture, and metaphysical devices.

The tours are part of Silicon Valley Open Studios and will be held between 11 AM and 5 PM both days, free of charge. Details can be found here.

The Bigfoot Discovery Museum

Mike Rugg had an encounter with a Sasquatch in northwestern California when he was four years old and has spent the rest of his long life gathering and presenting evidence to a skeptical world of the existence of these creatures. In 2004, he set up a little museum by the side of the road in Felton, a small town nestled in a redwood-lined valley north of Santa Cruz. Due to the elusive nature of the subjects there are very few artifacts of the creature itself, just some footprint casts, a couple of teeth of unknown origin, and some blurry video. Much of the collection consists of popular culture references to Bigfoot, including a collection of relevant Weekly World News issues ("I had Bigfoot's BABY!"). There is also a map of the Santa Cruz Mountains pinpointing recent sightings, a set of comparative skulls of other hominid species, and a diorama featuring two full size Bigfoot models. The diorama was dark and its contents appropriately difficult to photograph.


My own childhood did not involve any sightings, but I was fascinated by UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and related phenomena. I grew up reading the books of Charles Fort and Ivan Sanderson. Fort was a chronicler of paranormal wonders such as rains of frogs, giant wheels of light observed at sea, poltergeist activity, and spontaneous combustions, events that once might have been called "miracles." Sanderson was a pioneer of the field of cryptozoology, which uses the modern language of biology to establish the literal existence of animals that might otherwise be considered mythical. Its basic premise is that it is at least possible that large unknown animals exist in our modern world whose existence is unreasonably denied by the scientific establishment. Usually, they can only be detected by indirect evidence, eyewitness accounts, and the occasional blurry photograph or film.

In its flesh-and-blood form, Bigfoot is presented as a surviving remnant of an anthropoid race ancestral to humans. It is believed to be omnivorous, sometimes taking fruit from local trees and snatching chickens from pens, but otherwise harmless. Some Bigfoot researchers postulate that the creature has magic properties and can turn invisible.

If nothing else, the Bigfoot Museum supports the idea that there is still some mystery in the world, that not everything has been explored, that there is hope for a discovery that shakes our everyday assumptions. It harkens back to the Age of Wonder when nautical maps sported mermaids and other fanciful sea creatures, a world view on the edge of science and magic. There is something significant on the periphery of our vision, and try as we might to get it into focus, it always manages to elude us.

See also Loren Coleman's International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine and the Bigfoot exhibit at the Willow Creek-China Flat Museum in northern California.

Spirits under glass

This past weekend saw a return to the de Young museum's ethnographic collections, first profiled here three years ago. This time I was armed with a new image-stabilized camera to meet the challenge of the museum's "no tripod, no flash" photography rules, with the results found here.
The collections are drawn from Africa, pre-Columbian Mexico, and especially New Guinea.
Most of these objects originally had specific roles in the spiritual life of the community. They have fascinated Westerners for centuries as strange objects from exotic realms. To some, they were grotesque pagan idols, representing ignorance and savagery, and to the Romantics a glimpse into a purer human, one more deeply connected to the basics of existence from which we as industrialized people have become alienated. Anthropologists collected, identified, classfied, and recorded these objects, as a biologist would do with natural specimens, and they are often still displayed in natural history museums. In the early modern era, artists, especially those connected with the surrealist movement, saw these object as having genuinely inspirational aesthetic qualities which could be appreciated independent of their spiritual function. Finally, oceanic imagery devolved into kitsch with the development of the Tiki culture.
One function of a museum is to try stop the passage of time, to preserve decaying things under bell jars or pickled in brine, bringing dead things back to life in dioramas, preserving the artifacts of the past. Encased in the sleekly modern architecture of the museum we see organic figurines, made of wood, clay, stone, or feathers, once living spiritual objects, extracted from dying cultures, forever frozen in action in their vitrines.

For another photographic perspective on this collection, see here.

The de Young's New Guinea collection is documented here

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford contains a wealth of ethnographic artifacts in a Victorian setting. Its Web site offers a virtual tour

The Metropolitan Museum in New York City has a wonderful collection of African, Oceanic, and pre-Columbian artifacts, nicely documented here.

An excellent reference on the influence of "primitive" art on 20th century artists can be found here.

The Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science

We previously reported on a San Francisco Chronicle facsimile of its 1865 Lincoln assassination edition, which contained a notice for the long-gone Gilbert's Museum. On the opposite side of the same page was a prominent advertisement for "The Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science", located on Pine Street between Montgomery and Sansome. This educational institution, "For Gentlemen Only", specialized in wax models of instructive anatomy, most of whom were female, along with a collection of Egyptian mummies and preserved anatomical curiosities. It was a place where men fancying themselves refined gentlemen could gaze in detail on female anatomy in a civilized manner, foregoing the whorehouses, back alleys, and dangerous hellholes of the nearby Barbary Coast.

Popular anatomical museums were a common phenomenon in 19th century America. Unlike professional medical museums, which were intended for serious study by physicians, these tended to be sensationalist and scandalous while presenting themselves as morally uplifting. Many of the grotesque deformities and diseases (depicted in great detail in wax models) were attributed to immoral living, sexual misconduct, and self-abuse. The Pacific Museum ad touts a special exhibit on the 'evils resulting from TIGHT LACING...shown and illustrated by FULL LENGTH TRUTHFUL AND LIFELIKE FIGURES'.

A famous exhibit at The Pacific Museum was the head of the legendary Gold Rush-era bandit/folk hero Joaquin Murrieta, preserved in a jar. The head had been obtained from its owner in 1853 by a posse of rangers who needed proof that this person had in fact been dispatched in order to claim the reward offered by the governor of California. Whether that head was the same as the one in the museum is a matter of controversy.

The final fates of both head and museum are recounted by Richard Rodriguez:

The head, or another head, found its way to Dr. Jordan's Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science on Market Street in San Francisco, where it remained alongside kangaroos in canisters and Egyptian mummies and the "amazing cyclops child". One April morning in 1906, the lid of the jar began to rattle; the head revolved in its brine. The jar with the head and all the other jars moved on their shelves, then crashed to the ground. It was the Great San Francisco Earthquake. A hideous stew bubbled on the floor for several days as the city burned. Dr. Jordan's Museum did not burn down but it never reopened. A janitor mopped up the gore and it all got thrown away or was buried somewhere. So they say.

Popular anatomical museums had disappeared by 1930's due to a combination of suppression by the authorities, changing tastes in curiosities, and the availability of competing venues for observing female flesh. A modern version of this concept (now available to both sexes) is the traveling series of Bodyworlds exhibitions and their imitators. Real human bodies are meticulously preserved, posed as if alive, and put on display for the general public to view. There is less emphasis on disease, but there is the same combination of high-minded purpose and morbid curiosity.

Sources:

Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 by Barbara Berglund

Days of Obligation by Richard Rodriguez devotes a chapter to the search for Joaquin Murrieta's head.

The Decline and Fall of the Popular Anatomical Museum, by Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine

For more information on topic of anatomical museums, we refer interested parties to the excellent Morbid Anatomy blog, which includes an exhaustive set of links to medical museums around the world.

Museum Guide now available!

The lack of updates here over the past year has been mainly due to the gestation of a printed version of the museum. The resulting 50-page, full color, lavishly illustrated tome, The Zymoglyphic Museum: A Guide to the Collections, is now available to augment your library, to display on your coffee table, or simply be squirreled away for perusal at a later date. You will have the museum with all the sensual pleasures that a book affords, with more in-depth explanations than found on the Web site. The book reviews the history and artifacts of the Zymoglyphic Region, surveys its unique flora and fauna, and probes the nature and meaning of museum's place in the scheme of things. It can be yours for a mere double-sawbuck, or half that for an incorporeal version delivered directly to your virtual desktop.

Mark Twain Reviews a Museum of Curiosities in San Francisco

The San Francisco Chronicle recently printed a facsimile page of its coverage of the Lincoln assassination in 1865. One column to the left, under "Amusements", was this note:

GILBERTS MUSEUM - This ever attractive place for young and old, Gilbert's Museum, will have its doors thrown open as usual to the public to-day. The Chinese Jugglers and Learned Pig are still among the attractions.

For a few months in latter half of 1864, Mark Twain, the master of sardonic Victorian prose, was the only full-time reporter for the San Francisco Daily Morning Call. He filed the following dispatches from Gilbert's Museum:

July 3, 1864

MARKET STREET MUSEUM. - The management of this institution has had a severe though not painful attack of novelty on the brain. A whole batch of curiosities have been added to the cabinets during the week past. The French gentleman, extensively known as the Irish giant, and the lightning calculator, who must be a Yank -- notwithstanding he hails from Lancashire, are still there. The Museum is worth a visit at least once a week.

July 4, 1864

TOM THUMB AND HIS BRIDE. - We all remember what a furor was created when General Tom Thumb was married to Minnie Warren, at Grace Church, New York, and how the press teemed with descriptions of the interesting event. The whole bridal party are now in San Francisco, at Gilbert's Museum; not in the flesh, to be sure, but so near it that a casual glance would be likely to deceive all at a cursory view. We refer to the wonderful cero plastic group of the "Fairy Wedding," at the Museum, which Gilbert, through his keen sighted caterer, Hudson, lately brought on from New York. The group also includes a life-like representation of the great Barnum, the Master of Ceremonies on that interesting occasion. It is well worth a visit, and we are glad to know that the enterprise of the manager of the Museum is appreciated and rewarded. Thousands, including a vast crowd of the fair sex, crowd the Museum daily to see this remarkable exhibition.

September 25, 1864

GILBERT'S MUSEUM. - They have engaged an individual at the Museum who may be said to be minimum in regard to size, and maximum as to muscle. He is called the Lilliputian Hercules, and is probably about the dimensions of that mythological deity, when, as a suckling in his cradle, he strangled a serpent. He is some at lifting heavy weights, and it is proposed to engage him for the purpose of boosting the McClellanites into power. You can see the baneful effects of slavery here, too, in the person of a diminutive North Carolina female contraband, who has about as much brain as a humming-bird, and who could be put into a gallon measure with ease without contracting her crinoline. There are many other things here which make one lift his eyes and wonder at the freaks of Nature when she is in a frolicsome mood. Mr. Hudson has again assumed the management of the Museum, and he will speedily add other novelties to the collection.

The source is Twain scholar Barbara Schmidt's collection of newpsaper articles that can be attributed to Twain. He did not have a byline, but his style was so distinctive that these quotes are presumed to be his. Perusing the rest of Twain's articles makes for wonderful view of our fair city in its wild adolescence.

Gilbert's Museum would appear to have been one of the many "dime museums" that were popular in 19th century America. Most were on the East Coast, with P.T Barnum's American Museum in New York the flagship of the genre. They drew in the paying public with oddities, freakish amusements, and visual spectacles, then claimed the moral high ground with sanctimonious instruction. The history of the phenomenon is chronicled in the Weird & Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America.

The Albany Bulb: A Zymoglyphic Landscape in the East Bay

The Albany Bulb is a chunk of landfill west of the town of Albany, which itself is a bayside town just north of Berkeley. The Bulb is connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of land and was used as a garbage dump for many years. The landscape features slabs of concrete at odd angles, often painted wild colors, rusty rebar snakes everywhere, rampant vegetation, and trees festooned with all manner of strange objects. There is a community of people creating assemblage art from the treasure trove of decayed and weathered materials available in the weeds and trees. On the north shore, driftwood giants gaze across the bay and strange metal plants sprout from the grass. Winter storms knock down the art and provide material for new ones. The art currently varies from modest trailside assemblages to monumental driftwood-and-rusty-metal sculptures. Many of them are the creation of Osha Neumann. There is also an outdoor gallery of paintings that are slowly decaying into the landscape.

The area was formerly colonized by indigent campers, setting up homes under trees or in shacks. One of them built a small castle from local materials. As all the residents have now been rousted by the local authorities, the castle itself is decaying into the landscape. Documentation about the Bulb can be found here with a video here.

A previous generation of driftwood assemblagists created a sculpture garden in the mudflats west of nearby Emeryville. The constructions began in the mid-sixties and flourished in the following two decades; they were a treat to see while driving along I80 to the Bay Bridge. Some of them are the subject of a photo essay by Douglas Keister in his 1985 book Driftwood Whimsy. The mudflats are now the pristine Emeryville Crescent State Marine Reserve.

A Photogenic Metal Viewing Stone

Zhan Wang is a Chinese sculptor who has created a number of metal viewing stones in stainless steel, titled simply "Artificial Rock". He makes them by forming stainless steel over a selected rock, peeling away the metal, assembling the pieces into a hollow copy of the original stone, and polishing to a reflective shine. The result combines the complex forms and organic textures of the original stone with the sleek modernity of chrome.

Most of the artificial stones are one or two feet high, but there is one of monumental size in the de Young Museum's sculpture garden. Taking close-up photographs of the stone creates a sort of "found art". The rough texture creates a vertiginous funhouse mirror effect and, with no color of its own, the surface takes on the colors of the surrounding environment. Green patches are the reflection of surrounding vegetation, blue pools come from the sky, and the dark areas are shadows, often the photographer's own.

Zhan Wang has created his own series of similar photographs, an example of which can be found here.

Xenophora - part 2

While hapless seekers of natural wonders waited in a mile-long queue to view the rebuilt California Academy of Sciences last Saturday, a much more intimate experience was to be had a few miles to the south at the opening of the "Obsessions" exhibit at the Peninsula Museum of Art in Belmont. The show features a number of private collections, including the Zymoglyphic Museum's Xenophora collection.

Visitors peered closely at these little snails that collect shells, stones, and other objects and attach them to their shells as they grow. Some wondered if they were constructed objects, perhaps a subtle variation on the shell figures sold as seaside tourist souvenirs. Most were amazed that such apparently simple creatures could create such interesting and aesthetically pleasing works. One visitor of a certain age was indignant that she had not known about these animals before, believing that if such an interesting thing existed, surely she would have heard about it by now.

Shell collectors tend to prize shiny, smooth, and rare specimens. They find the "shells that collect shells" idea amusing but there does not seem to be much interest collecting them. Xenophora attract little scientific interest; the Zymoglyphic Museum's Xenophora collection rivals that of the Academy of Sciences itself, which, according to its invertebrate collection catalogue holds only 18 specimens of the family Xenophoridae.

The subtitle of the "Obsessions" exhibit is "Private collections and the history of art museums", highlighting the idea that art museums evolved from the wunderkammern of the European Baroque era. Private collectors amassed curiosities of all kinds. There was a keen interest in natural wonders, and shells in particular. It's in the art museum that the Xenophora can be fully appreciated as natural wonders and and as aesthetic objects with a more than superficial beauty, as well as the conceptual satisfaction of a collection of collectors in a collection of collections.

Thanks to Ruth Waters for including the collection in the show and DeWitt Cheng for the creating the professional display. The show runs until the end of the year.

Xenophora - Assemblage Artists of the Deep!

The Peninsula Museum of Art's fall exhibit will be "Obsessions: Selected Personal Collections", including the Zymoglyphic Museum's collection of molluscan collectors from the genus Xenophora. The museum is located in Belmont, CA, just south of San Mateo, and the show runs from Sept. 27 through December 3. A reception will be held at the museum on Saturday, Sept. 27, from 1 to 4 PM, and all are invited to attend.

Xenophora are marine snails that collect shells, stones, coral, and the occasional coin or glass shard. They attach these objects to their shells as they grow. A snail's shell grows by adding to the opening, and the snail attaches objects to this opening as it grows. Some snails consistently choose similar objects, resulting in neat radiating patterns; other collect a wild jumble of dissimilar objects.

A number of explanations have been advanced for the collecting behavior. Xenophora that live in shallower water, where there is enough light for them to be seen, probably use their collections for camouflage. Even in deeper waters the attachments may serve as a camouflage from predators that hunt by feel. Xenophora that live on muddy sea bottoms attach extensions to their shells to spread out the shell's surface area. This can help prevent the animal from sinking into the mud, and keep the shell's opening above the substrate. The additions may also strengthen the snail's relatively thin shell.

There is an unfortunate shortage of solid scholarly information on these animals. The only monograph in the field, Ponder's Xenophoridae of the World, is long out of print and difficult to find. This collection is thought by some museum visitors to be a hoax, displayed as it is alongside the museum's mermaid tank and its denizens being billed as "assemblage artists".