The Zymoglyphic Museum Curator's Web Log

Museum Roadshow to the Book Arts Jam, Oct 15

2011-10-08T18:47:00.000-07:00

The preceding flurry of announcements is leading up to this one: For the second year, the Zymoglyphic Museum will be rolling its roadshow down the Peninsula to the bucolic hilltop campus of Foothill College (Los Altos, CA) to showcase the full range of offerings from the Zymoglyphic Museum Press! Last year's version is shown above; this year's lineup will also include a new photo-essay book and an instructive pamphlet on creating your own museum.

The full list of books available:

The Tale of the Wandering Monk A new photo-essay featuring a diminutive traveler
Creating and curating Your Own Museum
The Zymoglyphic Museum - 110 page, full color guide to the museum
Views of the Zymoglyphic Region 32 pictures purporting to be prints from a 19th century voyage to the region, but in fact contemporary collages
Sketches of the Zymoglyphic Region

The Book Arts Jam is put on by the Bay Area Book Artists. It features one-of-a-kind artist-made books, as well as self-published items and materials that you can use to create your own books. In addition, there will be exhibits, demonstrations, and talks pertaining to the book arts. The show is on from 10 AM to 4 PM, and admission is free but parking is $2.

Creating Your Own Museum

2011-10-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel The Sirens of Titan, one of the main characters had a childhood museum, described as "a museum of mortal remains — of endoskeletons and exoskeletons — of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chitin — of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone."
Zymoglyphic Museum visitors often mention their own accumulations of detritus and effluvia, perhaps bones, rusty objects, memorabilia, or flea market finds. A new museum publication, Creating and Curating Your Own Museum, guides budding curators in the process of turning these raw materials into a personal museum. Copies will be available at the Book Arts Jam or may be downloaded in PDF format here

New Book: The Tale of the Wandering Monk

2011-10-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum Press is tickled to announce a new book, this one a photo-essay chronicling the adventures of the museum curator's diminutive traveling companion as he explores intimate landscapes in art and nature.

The tale begins with a box of rusty detritus donated to the museum by the late Neva Beach. The timing was fortuitious as the inside of the museum was getting bulgingly full, but remained rather plain on the outside. The items in the box prompted a grand landscaping upgrade. The new garden was immediately populated by four little monks of varying temperaments. One of them, the Wandering Monk, always seeking new perspectives, has as a favorite pastime hopping into enticing miniature environments and having his picture taken.

Many of his adventures take him inside art works. For example, here he is on a ledge inside Zhan Wang's "Artificial Rock" in the de Young Museum's sculpture garden. The photographs have been gathered into a book, which will have its public debut at the Book Arts Jam. The book is also available for purchase online in the museum shop. A preview of the photographs may be seen here.

Skip's Museum

2011-07-02T13:21:00.000-07:00

The second most frequently asked question from visitors to the museum (after "What does 'zymoglyphic' mean?") is "How long have you been doing this?" The long answer involves a tale of a childhood museum, collections of bird nests, shells, rocks, stamps; decay; changing interests; back to collecting again and eventually the resurrection of the museum. That story can be found in more detail here.

Near the outset of Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant, the richest and luckiest man in America, visits Winston Niles Roomford, a similarly wealthy space traveler who is caught in a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum," spread out across space and time but on occasion materializing in his palatial home. The visit occurs during one of these materializations and includes the following vignette as part of the tour Roomford gives Constant:

[ Roomford] led the way down a back corridor and into a tiny room hardly larger than a big broom closet: It was ten feet long, six feet wide, and had a ceiling, like the rest of the rooms in the mansion, twenty feet high. The room was like a chimney. There were two wing chairs in it.
"An architectural accident —" said Rumfoord, closing the door and looking up at the ceiling.
"Pardon me?" said Constant.
"This room," said Rumfoord. With a limp right hand, he made the magical sign for spiral staircase. "It was one of the few things in life I ever really wanted with all my heart when I was a boy — this little room."
He nodded at shelves that ran six feet up the window wall. The shelves were beautifully made. Over the shelves was a driftwood plank that had written on it in blue paint: SKIP'S MUSEUM.
Skip's Museum was a museum of mortal remains — of endoskeletons and exoskeletons — of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chitin — of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone. Most of the specimens were those that a child — presumably Skip — could find easily on the beaches and in the woods of Newport. Some were obviously expensive presents to a child extraordinarily interested in the science of biology.
Chief among these presents was the complete skeleton of an adult human male.
There was also the empty suit of armor of an armadillo, a stuffed dodo, and the long spiral tusk of a narwhal, playfully labeled by Skip, Unicorn Horn.
"Who is Skip?" said Constant.
"I am Skip," said Rumfoord. "Was."

"...dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone" has become a favored phrase in the museum's PR department. A dottle is the "wet and sour-smelling mass of unburned tobacco found at the bottom of a tobacco pipe." The Zymoglyphic Museum does not actually possess any known dottles in its holdings, but some of its more indefinable artifacts could plausibly be confused with them.

Open Days at the Museum - First 2 weekends in May!

2011-04-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum will be open for TWO weekends this year, May 7-8 and May 14-15 as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios from 11 AM to 5 PM each day. This year the studio of noted metal and book artist Judith Hoffman will also welcome visitors at the same location. Details here.

Obscura Day
The museum's overwinter accumulation of dust and cobwebs were stirred earlier this year when the museum was open for Obscura Day 2011. Visitors were encouraged, as usual, to take photographs, with the following results:
      Flickr user Microecos found some interesting hidden details in and around the museum
      Stephanie Theune led an expedition into wildest suburbia

Open Studio Enticements
The museum shop will be in full swing, offering:
    The official guide to the museum
    A book of engraving collages purporting to be views of the Zymoglyphic region
    Prints of said engraving collages
    A book of quick sketches also claiming to be views of the region
The museum has also acquired an intriguing bit of conceptual art from PreNeo Press which may (or may not) assist befuddled visitors in finding meaning in the museum.
A special exhibit will showcase the dreamy pinhole photographs of the museum made by Judith Hoffman during her tenure as artist-in-residence at the museum, as well as the homemade camera used to take the photographs.

Making Your Own Museum
In Kurt Vonnegut's novel The Sirens of Titan, one of the main characters had a childhood museum, described as "a museum of mortal remains — of endoskeletons and exoskeletons — of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chitin — of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone." Zymoglyphic Museum visitors often mention their own accumulations of detritus and effluvia, perhaps bones, rusty objects, memorabilia, or flea market finds. A new museum publication, Creating and Curating Your Own Museum guides budding curators in the process of turning these raw materials into a personal museum. Copies will be available in the museum shop or may be downloaded in PDF format here

Obscura Day II

2011-03-27T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Museum will be open to the public April 9, 2011, from 11 AM to 5 PM as part of Obscura Day 2011, sponsored by Atlas Obscura! "A day of expeditions, back-room tours, and hidden treasures in your hometown," assuming your hometown is one of the 80+ event locations around the world. The Atlas Obscura is an online compendium of "the world's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica", a designation of which our humble museum has been deemed worthy (readers may decide for themselves whether the museum is wondrous, curious, and/or esoteric).

This particular museum tour is limited to 60 participants and sold out last year - sign up here. For some insight on what to expect, you may refer to last year's entry, Obscura Day 2010. Photography is encouraged; photographs uploaded to Flickr (suitably tagged) are eligible to be showcased in the museum's Flickr galleries. Books from the Zymoglyphic Museum Press will be available for purchase.

Two New Books and a Book Arts Jam

2010-10-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum Press is pleased to announce the publication of a much-expanded and revised second edition of the official museum guide. This new edition includes a trenchant and erudite introductory essay by Peter Frank, ruminating on the Zymoglyphic ethos regarding nature, art from nature, and the nature of art. Peter is the art critic for the Huffington Post and Adjunct Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California.

"Sketches of the Zymoglyphic Region" is brand new booklet containing twenty recently discovered drawings from the Modern Age of the Zymoglyphic region. Inhabitants of the region were encouraged to fan out across the countryside and capture its wonders in quick, spontaneous strokes. The enigmatic results have been gathered here for the first time and are made available to the public at large.

Both books, along with an updated "Views of the Zymoglyphic Region" (a book of engraving collages), will be available for perusal and purchase at the Book Arts Jam on Saturday, Oct. 16, 2010 from 10 AM to 4 PM at Foothill College in Cupertino, California. A sampling of artifacts from the museum will be on hand, as will the curator.

The Book Arts Jam is an annual event put on by the Bay Area Book Artists. The show features one-of-a-kind artist-made books, as well as self-published items, mail art, and materials that you can use to create your own books. In addition, there will be exhibits, demonstrations, and talks pertaining to the book arts. Admission is free; parking is $2.

If you are unable or unwilling to attend the jam, you may purchase or download books online through the museum shop. Peter's essay is available as a download here

Visions of Alice

2010-08-21T18:49:00.000-07:00

Deep in the tulgey forest, Alice receives some confounding advice from the Caterpillar whilst a pair of slithy toves gyre and gimble. Nearby, resting in a sunny spot, is a Snap-dragon-fly, "its body made of plum-pudding, its wings of holly-leaves, and its head a raisin burning in brandy". The Red Knight is snoozing against a tree. The Jabberwock is trying to get some attention, but no one wants to awaken the Red Knight, since they are all phantoms of his dream.

Herewith we present a commemorative collage from the museum's publications department, featuring an arrangement of some of John Tenniel's original illustrations, set in a "tulgey wood" provided by Gustave Dore. Most of the collages in this series are views of the Zymoglyphic region, which, in fact, is not very far from Wonderland. See a previous blog entry for more of Alice's influence on the region.

A blockbuster version of the Alice story recently hit the big screen, transforming two complex, multi-level tales into a conventional battle of good vs. evil, albeit with eye-popping visuals. The museum's marketing department had advised us to cling tight to its coat-tails to promote this print, but the blog department was, like the White Rabbit, late. The print is nevertheless available in various sizes and framing options here

This collage was recently featured at Alicenations, one of the blogs maintained by Adriana Peliano of the Sociedade Lewis Carroll do Brasil. Adriana also creates amazing assemblages and collages inspired by the Alice stories, as well as traditional tales.

Two other Lewis Carroll societies exist, in the U.S. and the U.K, both tending toward somewhat more academic pursuits. This is perhaps the most interesting part of Carroll's legacy - that a synthesis of mathematical logic, wordplay, dream logic, storytelling invention, and a timeless view of childhood can inspire an apparently inexhaustible variety of movies, art, plays, and scholarly analysis.

A Tumultuous Week at the Museum

2010-05-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum's news desk is a sluggish thing, and is only just now getting around to reporting the events of the week beginning May 8th. The week opened with a very successful Open Day on that Saturday. Visitors converged from far and wide, including a pair who bicycled down from San Francisco, and others who came from Alameda, Berkeley, Mount Madonna, and possibly even further. Sunday morning came down with unseasonable rain coupled with a burst pipe in the exhibit preparation area, but the rest of the day went well, and included an impromptu Mother's Day tea in the museum's forecourt. One visitor sported a fine octopus tattoo based on an Ernst Haeckel design. Haeckel was an artist/scientist whose work features prominently in the Views of the Zymoglyphic Region.

During all this commotion, an uncommonly bold Bewick's wren was constructing a nest in the base of Scholar Monk's tree in the museum forecourt. He (the male builds the nest, subject to approval by the female) busily gathered sticks many times his own size, bits of moss, wool (provided by museum staff), and dry leaves, and assembled his homestead. Our stealthy museum photographic staff captured some of the activity.

Finally, late the next Friday night, while we dozed unawares, an alleged miscreant was apparently trapped by police in the cul-de-sac and an ensuing fracas toppled much of the museum's forecourt, leaving splotches of blood on the driveway among the deconstructed art. Authorities have been tight-lipped about what actually transpired, and the structures are now mostly resurrected. The pot that contained the wren's nest was crushed, but fortunately it was unoccupied. Presumably the female wren had vetoed the location some days before and is now chirping the wren equivalent of "See? I TOLD you!!". We hope they are happily ensconced in a less chaotic location.

Annual Open Days at the Museum

2010-04-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Continuing the time-honored, late-spring tradition, the museum will again open its doors to the public as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios. Potential patrons who were unable to secure tickets for Obscura Day have been granted a second chance, and other curiosity seekers will be welcomed. Visitors old and new will want to recommend the museum to their contacts, friends, acquaintances, followers, fans, correspondents, and any other such relationships that they may currently have.

Previous visitors should note that there will be the following NEW features this year:

- A newly remodeled forecourt, featuring the Garden of the Four Monks
- A display of prints from the Views of the Zymoglyphic Region series. Copies of the book will be available for sale on site.
- Sketches of the region, fresh from the curator's notebook, fleeting impressions captured in slapdash but intriguing pencil drawings.

Copies of the museum's Guide Book will be available for sale at a slight discount, and the curator will of course be available to help solve any museum-related mysteries (although there are no guarantees of satisfactory answers). Photography is encouraged and selected results will be highlighted by inclusion in one of the museum's Flickr galleries.

Directions may be found here. Those who are internal-combustion-challenged should note that the museum is a 10-15 minute walk from the Hillsdale train station.

Obscura Day at the Museum

2010-03-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

March 20, 2010 was Obscura Day, a set of 80 events around the world celebrating "wondrous, curious, and esoteric places". The day was sponsored by Atlas Obscura, an online compendium of such locations. The front men for the atlas are Joshua Foer (of the late lamented Athanasius Kircher Society) and Dylan Thuras (of the current and celebrated Curious Expeditions blog). A few of the museum's collections were presented in the Kircher Society's proceedings some years ago and the museum itself is currently listed in the Atlas Obscura.

The event was not publicized because it filled up early in February, much to the amazement of the museum's marketing department, which has struggled in vain for years to get people out to the wilds of San Mateo. Any potential patrons who missed out are reminded that the museum will be open again May 8th and 9th as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios.

There had been some concern on the part of museum management that visitors would be dropping by simply to gawk at something "eccentric" or perhaps just to be part of a trendy event . These fears proved unfounded as visitors showed genuine interest, as evidenced by the quality of the photographs taken. Samplings of these pictures have been gathered into galleries on the museum's Flickr page:

Zymoglyphic Museum Closeups
Photographers became absorbed in the details of the exhibits. Small components of the exhibits come alive in an amazing variety of ways in these pictures.

Zymoglyphic Dioramas
Kathryn Gritt came early, had the museum to herself for a good long while, and documented everything. She was especially successful at capturing the dioramas, which are a challenge to photograph well. Best of all, she produced two excellent little videos which capture the three dimensional qualities of the dioramas.

Hardly any visitors took pictures of themselves or others in the museum, so museum management has contributed a few documentary shots of the day that can be seen here

27 Views of the Zymoglyphic Region

2010-02-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

A previous post somewhat prematurely announced the discovery of a number of historical views of the Zymoglyphic region. Many more of these views have since surfaced and are now available in book form from the museum shop. You can also order individual poster size prints, framed or unframed. A generous sampling of the views may be seen here.

These views show the natural history of the area and scenes of daily life in its villages, woods, and jungles, beginning with the wet, humid, lowlands where Rust Age customs still hold sway, moving through the mountainous uplands, and finally entering the buzzing capital city at its center, as well as some of the more remote wonders on the region. Its people are engaged in creative, if often enigmatic, activities, in a landscape of strange and strangely familiar creatures, chimeras, and spirits.

Our resident Scholar Monk has discovered that these supposed documents are but fevered dreams, cobbled together from various European engravings whose sources have been tracked down. Most of them date from northern Europe's Age of Wonder, a world of extravagant architectural excess, grotesquerie, fabulous creatures, wunderkammers, and arcane alchemical investigations. The backgrounds owe much to a 19th century fascination with picturesque landscapes, especially Giovanni Piranesi's Roman ruins and the works of Gustave Dore. Dore's illustrations for Chateaubriand's Atala were used extensively. They imagine a primeval America of eerie dark woods, gnarled old trees, vast rivers, and tropical oases.

Much of the flora, some of the fauna, and even a bit of the architecture in these views was provided by the work of Ernst Haeckel, an artist/scientist noted for detailed depictions of plants and animals as art forms in his book Kunstformen Der Natur (1904).

In addition to numerous volumes in the Dover Pictorial Archive, two online sources have been ransacked for images. PK, a semi-anonymous blogger, has been scouring the world's digitized historical illustrations from his Antipodean outpost for many years, and posting the results at Bibliodyssey. His taste for the eccentric and propensity for high-reolution have been invaluable for this project. Mr. H explored a similar vein in the late Giornale Nuovo blog (2002-2007).

This sort of thing is not unprecedented. Other artists have used collages of old engravings, most notably the surrealist collage novels of Max Ernst, and more recently San Francisco's own Satty. The Ubu Gallery in New York recently had a show of artists who have used 19th century engravings in collage.

The Garden of the Four Monks

2009-08-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Museum's forecourt has gotten a major upgrade this summer, inspired by a generous grant of rusty materials, woody scraps, and other curiosa from Neva Beach. One may be forgiven for picturing Neva Beach as a pleasant shoreside locale where one can find treasures from the sea, and this is, in a sense, true, but Neva, properly speaking, is a person, not a place.

The xeriscape gardening against the museum's front wall is based on some gnarled stumps and includes of a number of strange plants endemic to the Zymoglyphic Isles, including land sponges (zoophytes, in fact, not plants at all) and the legendary Giant Rust Flower. This last flowers only once in its lifetime, but spectacularly, a huge colorful bloom; the flower then rusts in place, decaying slowly thereafter. Other plants derive their drought tolerance from metallic and plastic components.

The theme for the landscaping is the legend of the four Zymoglyphic monks, a tale from the Era of Oriental Influence. An ancient tradition holds that enlightenment can be sought in the study of nature and natural forces, especially rust. According to the tale, each monk set out to seek enlightenment, but as is so often the case, different schools of thought prevailed.

The Scholar Monk maintains a well-stocked library, surrounding himself with the writings of the great minds and kindred souls of the ages. He studies and reflects on them, compiles, analyzes, and synthesizes his research. He collects art and significant objects for inspiration (a favorite viewing stone, a copper nodule, is currently on display). He has staked out a breezy top-floor aerie in one of the garden plants, and installed a mobile that makes the wind visible. A little monkey comes to visit sometimes to remind him to get his nose out of his books and reconnect with nature.

The Rust Monk is less interested than the Scholar Monk in what other people have said and done. He wants to find his own unique way, unencumbered by the past, listening to an inner voice. He seeks enlightenment from his creative expression, to express things that cannot be said in words. He has collected a number of rusty objects and assembled them to create a complex living environment. His creation floats above the garden, not rooted in any part of it.

The Wandering Monk has decided to rid himself of the distractions of possessions, collections, books, and art, no matter how pure or ennobling they may be. He has kept only a bag full of necessities and set off to wander in the wilderness, savoring the freedom of the adventure, to see what nature and rust can teach him. In the twists and turns of the thick branches of an ancient stumpy tree, he has found a rusty viewpoint from which to view the passing scene and get some perspective on the world. He will soon be moving on in his restless quest.

The Shelter Monk is a sort of hermit. Like the Wandering Monk, he has cast away his possessions, but he is content with a simple place to sit in quiet, inward contemplation, sheltered from the buffeting environment. He believes that each part of the universe contains the whole and one need only stay in one place and fully experience it to attain the sought-after enlightenment. It is not necessary to go from one place to another. He has found his spot on a flap of rust, under a wide natural shelter, and he plans to stay there.

Views of the Zymoglyphic Region

2009-07-31T21:48:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum has longed claimed to be the world's repository of artifacts from the Zymoglyphic region. This is all well and good, but many have wondered just what this supposed place looks like, as the museum cuurently contains physical artifacts but no visual representations of the place itself. Our diligent curatorial staff has just unearthed some views made by artists accompanying the European and American explorers who long ago managed to penetrate the thick mists that surround the region. While some of what these images depict is be based in reality, there is much that can be attributed to the cultural biases of the image makers, not to mention tropical fevers and the gas produced by the notorious hallucinogenic fungus that populates the swampier areas of the region.

The full set can be seen here

Behind the Scenes Tours, May 16th and 17th

2009-04-26T19:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-01-23T19:09:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-17T18:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-31T14:43:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

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".

Museum Opens Doors to Public May 3rd and 4th!

2008-04-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum will open its doors to the public as part of the annual Silicon Valley Open Studios event. You will have a rare opportunity to see first hand the famous miniature dioramas, the curiosity cabinets, the crab, Xenophora, and viewing stone collections; inhale the heady air of decay; peer into the mermaid tank; lounge in the warm shade of a maple tree in the museum's forecourt, sipping lemonade, sampling crunchy snacks, and discoursing on the meaning of it all with the museum's curator. Note that this will be a solo turn as Mrs. Curator is taking a break this year and will not be participating. The Cafe Ruste will be operating as usual; however, service is restricted by museum policy and local ordinance to persons or other sentient beings under 3 inches tall. For those less vertically challenged, the Museum Shop will have on hand tempting samples of the daring new spring fashions for 2008, as well as enduring and comforting classics.

The museum will be open from 11 AM to 5 PM both days. Directions here. Vehicularly challenged patrons, or anyone so inclined, may take the train to the Hillsdale station and trundle on up to the museum, a healthy 3/4 mile hike.

The Maker Faire, a sort of science fair for mad scientists, inventors, and tinkerers, will be held the same weekend a scant 1.5 miles away from the museum - see directions here.

You can read reports on previous years' events in 2007 and 2006.

Penjing - Chinese Landscapes in a Tray

2008-02-24T16:58:00.000-08:00

Penjing are small dioramas that depict idyllic scenes in a tray using stones and living plants, carefully selected and arranged for the desired effect. The art form dates back at least 1300 years in China. Tree penjing was a style that showcased miniature trees, an art form familiar today as bonsai. Landscape penjing is another variety that creates three-dimensional versions of the idealized landscapes depicted in traditional Chinese painting. The stones used are selected for texture and form that represent in miniature a fantastic geology of caverns and dizzying vertical drops. Plants are added to make the arrangement come alive. The scenes are populated only by the occasional hut and the little boats that wend their way through the landscape.

An exhibit of ten landscape penjing is currently on view in the aquatic plant room of the Conservatory of Flowers, the big Victorian greenhouse in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. They will be there until April 27, 2008. The photograph above is closeup of one of them and others can be seen at Flickr.

Tray landscapes were popular during the Zymoglyphic Era of Oriental Influence. The only one currently in the museum's collection shows more of an emphasis on whimsical, rather than idyllic, theme and the use of strange dried stuff in place of stones and living plants.

An excellent book on penjing is
Penjing: Worlds of Wonderment: A Journey Exploring an Ancient Chinese Art and Its History, Cultural Background, and Aesthetics. The associated Web site is here

The Conservatory show was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle

Previous Web log entries on oriental nature-based arts:
Chinese root carving
Ikebana - Japanese Flower Arranging

Spring Fashion at the Museum Shop

2008-02-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

A gloomy, rainy, mid-winter weekend was brightened by the visit of a pair of charming visitors from Denmark. Lise Kroner (right) is a singer and musician whose work can be heard here. Astrid Sahl Andersen (left) is a storyteller and president of the newly formed "Zymoglyphic Museums danske fanklub". Astrid has an unusual collecting specialty - foster grandparents. The museum's curator and his wife have now been added to her collection.

Lise and Astrid graciously consented to model the museum shop's fashionable new spring line of mermaid-themed apparel, featuring the Zymoglyphic Mermaid. Shown here are the brand new women's black v-neck t-shirt and the familiar women's tank top with a fishy new design, perfect for today's up-to-date young women and those who would emulate them! The full session is captured at Flickr. You can view the full range of museum shop purchase options at Cafe Press.

Chinese Root Carving

2007-11-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum's Department of Special Collections has recently acquired for its curiosity cabinet this fine example of a root carving, a folk art tradition that goes back at least 2,000 years in China. Root carving is one of a number of Chinese and Japanese arts based on creating art from nature, with the focus on the natural characteristics of the object. We have previously covered ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging natural objects, and viewing stones, or scholar's rocks, which are complex stones presented for contemplation.
In this root carving, the anonymous artist has created an image not of a specific animal, but a dynamic creature of the imagination, full of life force, complete with hints of bones, sinews, musculature, and body cavities, all done through simple but effective highlighting of the natural features of the selected object.
A related folk art form is the carving of bamboo root, whose whiskery texture lends itself well to making intriguing masks. The museum has recently acquired an example of one of these masks, made by a member of the Tamang tribe of Nepal.

The Rainbow Jewel from Another Planet

2007-08-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

The object shown above is the Zymoglyphic Museum's acquisition number 1. According to legend, this mysterious object came to the Zymoglyphic region from another planet, carrying within it the seed of the museum.

My boyhood museum, was, like most modern museums, primarily dedicated to a fairly literal, scientific view of the world. I wanted to identify things accurately and categorize them correctly. However, this particular object is one of a couple of items in that original museum that were relics of an earlier, more fanciful, era. inspired by Superman's museum in his Fortress of Solitude. His museum included an alien zoo, souvenirs of his exploits and his trips to exotic places, and, most interesting to me, an entire city in a bottle, which may have been the inspiration for the creation of the Zymoglyphic dioramas many years later. Normally a very private space, Superman's museum was, like the Zymoglyphic Museum, open to visitors on occasion. In this story from Action Comics #261 (July, 1958), he brings the entire fortress to Metropolis so people can tour it.

One item that I had in my original museum was a bar of some kind of metal that was much softer than it looked. I bent it into an "S" shape and pretended that it was something that Superman himself might have created and displayed as a museum exhibit. The other was this small, multicolored chunk of melted material that I imagined was some sort of mysterious extraterrestrial artifact, possibly related to the "rainbow jewel from another planet" in Superman's museum. The "S" bar is long lost, but the rainbow jewel has survived through the years and is now on view in the Zymoglyphic Museum atop its own little pedestal, framed in the style of a viewing stone, .

Open Studios Report

2007-08-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

The curator's web log is finally being resuscitated after withering in a prolonged summer drought. The open studios event for 2007 provided an idyllic interlude for visitors to sample both the museum and the books and metalwork of Judith Hoffman. Photographs of the festivities have been posted to the museum's Flickr account, providing long-awaited proof that the museum does truly exist as a physical entity and not just as a Web site. In fact, the museum is now visible from space, or at least somewhere in that general direction, as shown above (with commentary by Zippy the Pinhead).

The museum's landscaping program was completed in time for the event. The ecological landscape design uses recycled materials and provides a lively counterpoint to the otherwise bland exterior of the museum. A skilled team of spiders maintains the zymoglyphic nature of the landscaping by connecting various parts with webs and capturing random debris in them.

The museum shop reported a 100% increase in its customer base during the event. This singular feat was accomplished by selling a mug to museum colleague and noted L.A. art critic Peter Frank. In the ensuing confusion, museum management failed to obtain from Mr. Frank any sort of trenchant aesthetic analysis of the mug's postmodern, self-referential qualities, perhaps even addressing whether the mug is itself a work of art, and the act of buying one an act of performance art.

The opening also inaugurated the museum's Cafe Ruste, a small shop designed to accommodate customers who are less than three inches tall.

Museum to be Open to the Public May 19th and 20th!

2007-05-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum will have its annual weekend of being open to the public on May 19th and 20th as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios! This is a rare chance to see the exhibits in person. Especially recommended are the dioramas, which are difficult to present adequately in photographs.

Previous visitors will be pleased to note that there have been a number of new acquisitions in the last year, including a new diorama and the copper scrolls. If you haven't attended this event in a while, you can see the full list of what's new here.

Also on site will be the delectable metalwork and artist's books of Judith Hoffman

You may wish to make your visit part of a more comprehensive tour of the Peninsula's Open Studios. Tour maps will be available at the museum.

That modern celebration of mechanical wonders known as the Maker Faire is the same weekend and visitors in town for it should note that the Zymoglyphic Museum is located less than 20 short blocks to the south. If you are visiting the Faire, be sure to make the museum a part of your day!

Directions here

New Diorama: Dream House

2007-04-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum has just added a new diorama in an unusual style. Zymoglyphic dioramas are most frequently constructed in fish tanks or vitrines; this one uses an old display case to show a modern couple connecting to their "roots" in a most literal sense. For another view of domesticity in a diorama, see The Quiet Parlor of the Fishes

Museum Shop Financial Report and Price Cut

2007-04-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

Our accountants have finally gotten around to tabulating and analyzing the vast lack of sales in the museum shop for fiscal year 2006. Since we cannot use any positive integers to describe the sales figures, we are looking into the feasibility of utilizing transcendental or imaginary numbers instead. Our statisticians remain stymied by the necessity of having to divide by zero.

Our marketing department recently convened a focus group consisting of the shop's entire customer base to review our offerings. In accordance with the group's findings, we have added a number of fine items to our once meager product line, including a mousepad and bumper stickers. As always, rebellious young ladies (and their suitors) should take particular note of our "thong" undergarments featuring the controversial and possibly inappropriate "flying dead mouse" design.

Our outside marketing consultant, Harry "The Axe" Warbler, suggested that we "cut prices down to the jugular vein!!" and proclaim "we've lost our heads!!!." His proposed accompanying visuals, while undeniably edgy and eye-catching, were rejected by the good taste committee as unnecessarily graphic. However, we are pleased to announce that prices have indeed been reduced and are now so low we would need to consider cash incentives to convince potential customers to avail themselves of our merchandise. Harry suggests, possibly sarcastically, that perhaps our slogan should be "Please be sure to take advantage of the situation before our peripatetic cephalic appendages are located and properly reattached."

Zymoglyphic Alchemy: Copper Scrolls

2007-04-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum has added a significant new collection to its Rust Age holdings - a set of copper scrolls depicting the mythical Primordial Ooze. During the Rust Age, most artifacts were constructed using naturally weathered materials, whether rusty metal or partially decayed organic matter. However, there were attempts by early Zymoglyphic alchemists to reproduce these effects artificially, a collaboration of art and nature (following, as always, the dictum "Let nature do the detail work").

European alchemists had a goal to transform base metals, such as copper, which were subject to corruption through natural oxidation, into pure gold, which was incorruptible and did not tarnish or weather. Zymoglyphic alchemists were more interested in maximizing the corruption of the base metal; purity was seen a sort of bland homogeneity. The Zymoglyphic ideal was to transform something relatively pure, such as a sheet of copper, into something more complex and interesting. Alchemists in both cultures sought to release "spirit in matter" through the symbolic dissolution of metal and creation of its fermentation byproducts.

Zymoglyphic alchemists used many of the same chemicals on their copper that their European counterparts used to transform metal - blue vitriol (copper sulfate), sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), liver of sulfur, and common salt, as well as biologically derived fluids such as vinegar and urine. By applying this process to scrolls of sheet copper, they produced pre-literate "books" that told the story of the creative ferment in the primordial ooze. During the Zymoglyphic Age of Wonder, alchemists focused more on metaphysical transformations, rather than chemical ones, as can be seen in this alchemical apparatus from that era.

Copper has been valued throughout Zymoglyphic history. It is one of the very few metals besides gold (and iron meteorites) to be found naturally in pure metallic form. Copper ores can be very attractive, particularly green malachite and and its brilliant blue relative, azurite. Both are chemically closely related to copper patina, or verdigris. The museum has a particularly nice specimen of malachite which was mounted as a viewing stone during the Era of Oriental Influence. A mineral specimen containing both malachite and azurite was incorporated into the Age of Wonder's small cabinet of wonders, and a complex nodule of metallic copper is on display as a miniature sculpture in one of the Modern Era's shoebox art galleries.

Some further references on historical alchemy:

The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century A coffee-table size book focused on the visual imagery of alchemy

Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum (Klotz) Primarily imagery, organized by concept

Psychology and Alchemy Carl Jung's take on the symbolism of alchemy as personal transformation

The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy Alchemy's origins in metallurgical and mining mythology

The Alchemy Web Site

For pictures of copper ores, see Molly Holzschlag's Mineral Art Flickr set

Ikebana: An Ancient and Modern Natural Art from Japan

2007-03-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

I went up to San Francisco last weekend to see the biennial Ikebana Flower Show in Golden Gate Park. Ikebana originated some five hundred years ago in medieval Japan as a spiritual expression of natural energies, often in association with Zen Buddhism. It is primarily a formal arrangement of flowers, branches, and a variety of other objects, usually placed on a stand or in a vase. Ikebana can celebrate any season, but it is at its best as celebration of the rebirth of nature in spring.

Both ancient and modern approaches were represented in the show. The arrangement at the top left, by Grace Murata, is in the Ikenobo style, a traditional school which dates back to the 15th century and emphasizes formal training. On the upper right is a more modern version from Keiko Yamamoto using hair clips and wadded up newspaper, in the Sogetsu style. Sogetsu is a school founded in 1927 which encompasses a broad range of styles, including free form and avante-garde, and invites participation by anyone. The lower arrangement, by Michiko Hosada, is an example of the Chiko school, which can include architectural elements, figures, and other objects to create symbolic landscapes. Examples from some of the many other schools of ikebana can be seen here and here.

Ikebana is much like Zymoglyphic art, especially that of the Era of Oriental Influence. Both are based on the assemblage of (mostly) natural objects, selected, arranged, and composed for a poetic effect, and placed in some framing context, such as a stand or a decorative vase. Both aspire to be something more than simple decoration. An ikebana arragment, such as the one shown below, may contain materials familiar to fans of Zymoglyphic art, such as dried fungus, mossy branches, gnarled driftwood, wire, seaweed, or rusty objects (although we are unaware of any ikebana containing dead animals). The focus on fresh flowers usually makes ikebana a more evanescent art than a typical Zymoglyphic artist would prefer, needing to be constantly renewed and redone, surviving only in pictures and memories. The museum's curiosity cabinet contains an example of a more durable ikebana arrangement, acquired at the 1998 ikebana show.

A good introduction to ikebana, focusing on the wide-ranging Sogetsu school, is Ikebana: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Japanese Flower Arranging The image here is taken from that book.

New Online Exhibit: Baroque Museum Tour

2007-03-09T16:05:00.000-08:00

Our esteemed cyberpatrons are welcome to take a virtual tour of six personal museums from Europe's Baroque era. One of them, Athanasius Kircher's museum, was featured here recently. Above, Ferdinando Cospi beckons across the centuries and invites us to pore over his collection of lizards, things in jars, sealife, figurines, weaponry and objects of all kinds.
These personal museums may be considered early forerunners of the Zymoglyphic Museum, sharing a goal of collecting wonders rather than instructing the public in literal facts. While they reflected the personal interests of their creators, these early museums contained enough variety to create within their walls a microcosm of the world.

Athanasius Kircher's Museum in Rome

2007-02-10T16:51:00.000-08:00

Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century Jesuit scholar, and studied, among other things, magnetism (both physical and personal), linguistics (with a specialty in hieroglyphics and cryptography), vulcanology (most notably via an expedition into Vesuvius), and the customs of exotic lands such as China and America. Many of the theoretical conclusions from his voluminous researches did not survive the test of time, so the results of his investigations are valued today more for their mythic and inventive qualities than their scientific accuracy. Kircher was also an inventor, and created, designed or improved animated fountains, magic lanterns, talking statues, and elaborate optical and musical instruments.

Kircher maintained a museum in Rome's Collegio Romano. The illustration above is from Giorgio de Sepibus's 1678 catalog of the museum. (click to see the full image). The museum contains the range of his interests: curiosities of nature, sculptures, Egyptian obelisks, and many of his mechanical marvels, all capped by a cosmic ceiling. Not shown in the images, but listed in the catalog, are a lizard encased in amber and a pair of creatures that were most likely the same species as the Zymoglyphic Museum's Jenny Haniver. The museum also included bound volumes of his correspondence, the 17th century equivalent of a curator's web log. His museum was really an extension of himself and went into decline soon after his death. The mechanical marvels stopped working and the more fanciful specimens disappeared. A catalog of the museum published in 1760, 80 years after his death, listed only antiquities.

I had not heard of him when I was younger, but I was afflicted with the same desire to know everything. I had a similarly wide range of interests: linguistics, cosmology, anthropology, biology. I ended up not going into science beacuse I could not specialize, and because science, broad as it was, still seemed too limited to physical reality, too literal, lacking in imagination. Perhaps creating a multi-faceted, personal museum has been the inevitable outcome.

The spirit of Father Kircher walks among us today in the form of the Secretary of the Athanasius Kircher Society. The society's Proceedings are daily writeups of the sorts of curiosities and esoterica that would have interested Kircher, and consistently the most interesting of the "oddities" blogs. The Proceedings have in the past year featured two of the Zymoglyphic Museum's collections, the Xenophora, shells that collect shells, and the miniature viewing stones. The Kircher Society recently has its first annual meeting in New York.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has an excellent exhibit on Kircher that reproduces many of his mechanical wonders.

The museum image above is from Stanford University's highly recommended Athanasius Kircher Project. Information about Kircher's museum is drawn from Paula Findlen's article "Science, History, and Erudition: Athanasius Kircher's Museum at the Collegio Romano" in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher

New Philatelic Wing Opens

2007-01-21T11:19:00.000-08:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum is now in the process of putting its philatelic collection online. The first installment can be seen here.

"What attraction, dear reader, has a postage stamp for you?...Is it a symbol of ordinariness, or is it the ultimate within the bounds of possibility, the guarantee of unpasssable frontiers within which the world is enclosed once and for all?...A stamp album is a universal book, a compendium of knowledge about everything human. Naturally, only by allusion, implication, and hint. You need some perspicacity, some courage of the heart, some imagination in order to find the fiery thread that runs though the pages of the book."

From the story "Spring", in The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

My original museum, from when I was about 10 or 11, primarily included natural history objects, such as shells, rocks, and the occasional animal skin. However, like any decent curiosity cabinet, it also included cultural artifacts: arrowheads, kachina dolls, some square nails, and a worldwide stamp album. The stamps gave me a sense of connection to faraway, exotic places and collecting them created a sort of microcosm of the world. I was especially fascinated by the tiny, independent republics and principalities of Europe and idyllic scenes from isolated topical islands. The stamps of Africa and Oceania introduced me to romantic images of tribal art and lifestyles. My goal was to collect a stamp from every country in the world. I eventually lost interest in collecting stamps when exotic-sounding places like Bhutan, Tonga, and various Arabian sheikdoms started issuing gimmicky stamps which were clearly aimed at collectors and had no connection to their own cultures.

Later, in my forties, we inherited my wife's grandfather's collection of worldwide stamps. Judy had also been a collector as a girl, and it was something she and her grandfather would do together. While poring through this old album, I was inspired to start collecting again, taking up the task of collecting at least one stamp from every stamp-issuing entity. I spent a lot of pleasant weekend days hunting at local stamp shows and finding a stamp or two from some ever more obscure place. The total currently stands at more than 600 countries, territories, and other postal administrative units of the past and present.

Because of my interest in (and sympathy with) things that don't fall into standard categories, I became attracted to stamps known as "cinderellas" that were spurned by the mainstream collectors. These included stamps issued by independence movements in places such as Biafra and Chechnya, local postage from various British islands, and stamps produced by micronations. These have become the "exotic locales" of the modern world. Finally, I added the infinite and entirely imaginary geography of artist's stamps to my collecting. These can be any image in postage stamp size and style, but I have limited myself to ones purport to be from somewhere.

Stalking the Wild Tafoni

2007-01-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

The museum has recently mounted expeditions to find and document a rare natural art form known as "tafoni". Tafoni is a type of rock on which weathering has produced a zymoglyphic result. The rock results from a combination of tectonic activity and our Mediterranean climate. San Mateo is very close to the San Andreas Fault, where two of the earth's major tectonic plates grind together. Crossing the Crystal Springs Reservoir into the hills to the west takes you across the fault, from the North American Plate to the Pacific Plate. Over the millenia, the seismic ferment has caused ancient sea beds to be pushed upwards and become land. In some places, fossilized remnants of these sea beds are exposed as isolated knobs of sandstone.
Once exposed, the weathering begins. The rock absorbs water during our wet season, dissolving calcium from ancient bits of sea shells. During the dry season, the evaporation of the water draws the calcium to the surface, resulting in an uneven erosion of the remaining rock. The result is an evocative combination of sinewy fretwork and miniature troglodyte landscapes.

These rocks can be seen at the "Sandstone Formation" on the Tafoni Trail in El Corte de Madera Creek Open Space Preserve and a number of locations in Castle Rock State Park. More expedition photos, and a graphic showing how tafoni forms, can be seen here. Tafoni also forms in rocks along the local beaches and some excellent photos of it by tafoni aficionado Dawn Endico can be seen here.

Further details on rock formations in the Bay Area

The Cheese of the Month Club

2006-12-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum's collections serve a variety of purposes. Its main holdings are the Zymoglyphic artifacts, which include among them the famous miniature viewing stone and Xenophora collections. Since collecting and arranging objects is an important aspect of Zymoglyphic culture, the museum maintains an auxiliary set of collections which reflect that spirit. One type of collection is the curiosity cabinet, in which a wide variety of natural and artificial wonders are gathered together. Another is the specialized collection, where a number of related objects are presented as variations on a theme. The museum's specialized collections now have their own exhibit space.

We have previously featured here the crab and happy object collections. In this entry we showcase the museum's unique Living Cheese collection. These are rare English cheeses which have been created using a special process which gives them each a unique personality. They are, from left to right, Swiss, Nacho, and Blue.

This collection was acquired via subscription to the Cheese of the Month Club, an exclusive group of which this museum was the only known member. Unfortunately, the subscription only lasted three issues, with a fourth installment being devoured enroute from London (see below). Fortunately, the museum considers three the minimum number of related items needed to qualify as a collection. The club's proprietor, Sarah Brunner, is now running the Otto Retro shop in Exeter, Devon.

Rosamond Purcell's Art from Decay

2006-11-26T10:03:00.000-08:00

Rosamond Purcell has a long history of providing inspiration to the Zymoglyphic Museum as a photographer of museum specimens, a scholar of curiosities, an exhibit curator, a writer, and an assemblage artist of decay. Her photographs of natural history museum specimens earned her a place in the museum's Photographers of the Marvelous online photography exhibit, and her use of natural light in these pictures has been an inspiration to our own curatorial department's attempts to document our museum's collections. One of her collaborations with Stephen Jay Gould, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors, includes the story of Peter the Great's Kunstkammer in 18th century Russia, and, in particular, his acquisition of Frederik Ruysch's collection of anatomical dioramas and other preparations. The book includes Purcell's photographs of some of the few remaining Ruysch objects . Further research on curiosities and marvels led her to write Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, examing the historical significance of marvels.

In 2003, Purcell curated a traveling exhibit called Two Rooms. One room was a reconstruction of a small but historically important natural history museum created in the 17th century by Ole Worm. The other room featured a reconstruction of Purcell's own studio/museum, with walls of rusted metal sheets, a library of decayed, worm-eaten books, and arrangements of a variety of objects transformed by nature and weathering. Most of these objects came from a single source, a vast junkyard in Maine which she has been mining for aesthetic gold for two decades, and whose story is told in the book Owls Head

Her new book Bookworm: The Art of Rosamond Purcell finally showcases her photographs of her own found and created decayed objects. The range is a mix of weathered objects and textures, photographic collages, and assemblages constructed for the purposes of the photograph. Shown above is "Book for Fishes", combining a fish skeleton with an old, insect-eaten book found in a Harvard library. For a preview of the book, see the slideshow/review at Slate.com

There seem to be still more Zymoglyphic inspirations which have yet be fully documented. Above are two photographs from "Two Rooms", the exhibition catalog. The top one is a "miniature museum" from 1994, similar in spirit to the Zymoglyphic shoebox art galleries and the bottom shows a number of objects on display in her studio, any of which would be at home in our museum.

Only 312 days until Wacky Web Site Day!

2006-11-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

Mark your calendars! Or if you buy the Wacky Web Sites Page-A-Day Calendar 2007, you won't have to, because Sept. 20, 2007 will already be marked as the day the Zymoglyphic Museum is the official Wacky Web Site of the day. This honor comes on the heels of the recent successes of the museum's marketing department's low-key strategy of basically not doing any marketing. The museum was recently listed on Neatorama, a site with some two million daily pageviews. It was suggested to them by Presurfer and picked up later by a number of other sites, including Monster Brains, NetKulture (sounds better in French!), and Grow-A-Brain (lumped in with Alzheimer's art and next to art made from dog food). A blogger known only as Jeff said "One of the neatest things I've ever seen. The Hallowed Pussy would feel right at home here." No idea what he meant by that, and the entry has since vanished.

The upshot was a multi-day spike in web traffic and an additional blog subscriber or two, bringing that count close to double digits. By the way, if you wish to subscribe to the blog via e-mail (not a bad idea considering how erratically it is updated) and don't know what RSS means, just send in your e-mail address and you can receive it that way. E-mail subscriptions come with the usual lifetime no-spam guarantee.

Now, our curatorial department might well prefer a grad student or two to write a scholarly treatise on the museum instead of the "wacky web site", or "zymo-what?", approach, but we will take what we can get. The museum has yet to find its Lawrence Weschler, who chronicled the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The Museum of Dust has come pretty close when not distracted by territorial spats and interplanetary intrigue. We and the MoD were featured recently on BlueTea's virtual museum tour, and this Live Journal entry was particularly endearing. We offered her a job, but she ultimately declined. Other blogosphere musings on the museum can be found here, here, and here.

Fascinatin' Crustaceans

2006-10-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum's Arthropod Division has recently expanded its Crabs of the World collection with a shipment from Conchology, Inc. of the Philippine Islands. The museum's original collection has been a miscellany of eBay, shell shop, and other purchases, not always with proper identification. A recent concerted effort for taxonomic accuracy in identifying its various specimens has been aided by a number of helpful folks at The Crustacean Society.

Crabs have an important place in Zymoglyphic culture. When dead, they often look as though they are just posing for a really long time, and so make excellent diorama characters. They are the stars in the traveling crustacean mini-diorama, as well as supporting actors in many of the museum's aquatic dioramas. They are nautical mechanical marvels, from the tight, interlocking parts of a box crab to the implausibly leggy spider crabs. Some, such as the fiddler crab, verge on becoming "eccentric contraptions", surreal beings whose very existence seems impossible. Some have great character, such as the leopard crab shown above.

In previous entries, we have featured as "natural assemblage artists" the bowerbirds, who collect and arrange various objects to attract mates, and the Xenophora, shellfish which collect and arrange other shells on themselves. Decorator crabs take the latter idea further and make themselves into living, walking gardens. They cover themselves with a selection of living seaweed and plant-like animals, such as sponges, corals, and bryozoans. This is not a weed garden in the sense of just allowing things to grow on the carapace; the selections are carefully nipped and placed on specialized projections on the shell. The purpose is both camouflage and protection due to the poisonous nature of many of the selections. The festively decked-out crab shown here is a Cyclocoeloma tuberculata (photo from edge-of-reef.com).

If you are in the Seattle area and interested in crustaceans, there is an excellent collection at the shell museum in Port Gamble, a ferry ride across Puget Sound from Seattle.

Further Adventures of the Zymoglyphic Mermaids

2006-10-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

Jenny Haniver and her cousin, the Zymoglyphic Mermaid, featured here recently, have been conscripted by the Museum of Dust to help out in Terra Incognita's impending war with the Republic of Tinselman. This so-called "republic" is actually run by a khan, or perhaps some other of the ever-changing panoply of tyrants and despots that seem to take turns ruling the place, with media magnate Rupert Murdoch apparently in on it too. Mermaids have historically played roles of destructive seduction, and our "paragons of pulchritude" (in our director's well-turned phrase), have been assigned to lead Mr. Murdoch astray. We have received news that Murdoch is now "fully occupied on the tiny islands off RoTs borders explaining cross-media ownership laws to the Zymoglyphic Mermaid and Jenny Hanniver". Tinselman appears at the moment to be coming unglued due to the extreme convolutions of its own plotlines, and may simply collapse of its own weight.

The Leatherwing, show above, is from the Zymoglyphic Museum's natural history collection. A more primitive relation of the Zymoglyphic Mermaid, it is a night-flying creature that may be useful for espionage and reconnaissance purposes. We will await word from Director de Plume on its mission.

On a taxonomic note, we must distinguish between the mermaids native to the Zymoglyphic region (order Rajiformes) and their distant cousins, the "Feejee mermaids". The latter are distinguished by a simian appearance in the upper body and a generally agonized facial expression (as opposed to the winning smiles on our own beauties). The "Feejee mermaids" originated in the waters of the western Pacific; that portion of their history is ably chronicled by Pink Tentacle. P.T. Barnum acquired one of these and made it famous. Due to the lack of genitalia (because of the lack of a crotch in which to contain them), there is some gender ambiguity, and they are also known as mermen. Modern specimens can be found here and here.

From the Ancient Land of Happy Objects

2006-10-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

A return trip to the de Young Museum in San Francisco turned up this fellow, a local emissary from Remojadas, the ancient Land of Happy Objects. Cheeky Pete was delighted to learn of this long-sought ur-object, the King of Happy Objects, but despite intense imaginary negotiations with the de Young curatorial staff, it was not possible for him to obtain the King for the museum's Happy Objects Collection. The King thus remains trapped in his plexiglass case. He is originally from the Veracruz area of Mexico, and is some 1300 years old. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a cousin of his, and nervily suggests that his happiness is primarily due to intoxication.

The Remojadas culture had its "Classic" period between 500 and 800 AD, and produced a large number of "smiling figures". Further research by the curatorial staff has revealed the existence of a classic 1960 tome about the figurines produced in Remojadas: William Spratling's More human than divine: An intimate and lively self-portrait in clay of a smiling people from ancient Vera Cruz. Spratling was a collector, and waxes naively rhapsodic about the people who produced these figurines:

The little people of Remojadas flourished, loving their own creations, presumably in utter peace and contentment, for more than eight hundred years.

The main attraction of the book is the set of plates by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, a leading Mexican photographer often linked with the Surrealists. The photographs reveal that the figurines had a whole range of expression, not just smiling. The plates are classics of artifact photography.

Notes from the Museum's Mermaid Tank

2006-10-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Mermaid collecting has had a rather difficult and controversial history. Mermaid collectors are often beguiled by artists' depictions of full-size, curvaceous, fish-women, but the actual specimens that show up in collections tend to be much shorter and not really all that human-looking. Some species seem to be a primate-fish mixture, with the type specimen generally regarded to be P.T. Barnum's Feejee Mermaid, exhibited at his American Museum. Modern versions can be seen here.

The Zymoglyphic Museum's new curiosity cabinet acquisition, shown above, belongs to a family of mermaids that has been referred to throughout history by the common name "Jenny Haniver".

This related species appears in Ulisse Aldrovandi's posthumously published 1642 work, Monstrorum historia

This sighting of a somewhat more primitive species is from Ambroise Pare's 1573 work, On Monsters and Marvels

This one appears in Mary Thompson's 1960 natural art classic, The Driftwood Book (photo by Leonid Skvirsky)

This specimen is from the 1975 catalog of the Wonders of the World Museum.

The Zymoglyphic museum's new acquisition joins two existing specimens in its natural history department. This one, referred to as the Zymoglyphic Mermaid, is endemic to the Zymoglyphic region. Also native to the region is a primitive flying species known as the Leatherwing.

Cheeky Pete's Collection of Happy Objects

2006-09-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum Shop's Marketing Department regrets to announce that Cheeky Pete the Clown has resigned his position as drinkware manager (or "commercial shill" as he calls it) a scant few weeks into the job. The curatorial staff, on the other hand, is delighted to announce that Mr. Clown has shown great initiative and curated his own exhibit of "happy objects" from the museum's curiosity cabinet. He is, needless to say, quite pleased with the results!

Mr. Clown would like to remind the museum's patrons that the museum is not all about dead animals and decay. He points to historical precedents in the Zymoglyphic region, such as the native happy fish species and the legend of the happy monk.

Top shelf: A pair of Latin American whistles waiting for a happy tune. One is a serenading bovine devil and the other is a mysterious creature with a Mona Lisa smile.

Next shelf: A chorus of shell-shop frogs (souvenir of Florida) and a goofy plastic dinosaur

Then: A pair of happy shell frogs relaxing on a tropical island

And next: A set of (maniacally happy) "Crazy Newts" which have escaped from the hallucinogenic mind of Jim Woodring and taken on a solid form

Bottom shelf: Agate creatures. It is often hard to tell if stone figures are happy, but Mr. Clown, being an inanimate object himself, assures us that these are. Also, a grinning death's-head pipe (Mr. Clown says: "It's for smoking killer weed! Ha Ha!").

Those interested in greater detail may wish to click on the above image.

-- Museum Staff

The Quiet Parlor of the Fishes

2006-08-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

Late in the 1980's, before the Zymoglyphic Museum existed, I had an idea to make an aquarium, not with water, but a scene with a sandy bottom. This would be a big version of the surreal scenes in sandtrays that I had been making at that time. I was recently married then, and the theme was of two fish making a home in a strange world. I liked the idea that the result would be a piece of furniture you would have in your house, rather than a piece of art intended for a pedestal in a gallery. It was even rather practical, in that it would be very low maintenance for an aquarium. The aquarium was made of various things that I had found and had been given. My wife was making intricate hinged fish out of metal and plexiglass, and I thought an aquarium would make a nice home for some of them.

Even the title, "The Quiet Parlor of the Fishes", is a found object, taken from Thoreau's "Walden":

I cut my way through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

"Walden" was one of my favorite books in high school. It provided a mythic and spiritual dimension to nature that transcended the mere collecting, naming, and classifying of specimens, which had been the focus of my original museum. The summer between high school and college, I even tried a brief emulation of Thoreau's year-long stay at Walden pond. I camped out by myself for four days on an island in the middle of a small mountain lake in Olympic National Park. I paddled out to the island on a primitive boat made by tying driftwood logs together, read Walden, and wrote a short journal, trying to emulate Thoreau's 19th century style.

In this dry aquarium, the two fish have a little television set in their parlor and are watching a program that features one of the Judy's art-fish. They also have their own little dry aquarium, foreshadowing the worlds-within-worlds theme of the museum-to-come. This first aquarium was followed by a series of small dioramas inside standard 10-gallon aquariums. Some had a terrestrial theme and some were aquatic. The serenity of the underwater world, eternal and unchanging, gave way to the archetype of the primordial ooze, a crowded, dense, active, messy world of creation, decay, and conflict, and a Walden-like mythological cycle of death and rebirth.

In recent years, I have been trying to capture a sense of the little worlds inside the dioramas in close-up photography and I think this is one of the more successful attempts. It is the little aquarium in fishes' parlor. This picture was, in fact, my entree into hallowed halls of the Museum of Dust.

In the past couple of months, Judy has been experimenting with pinhole photography, using homemade mini-cameras. I was not convinced of the true potential of this technique until she took some photos of the aquarium, which gave the whole thing a dreamlike air. The full set of photos can be seen here. One of the those photos, of an astronaut from the moon who is coming to visit the fish, resulted in her own initiation into the Museum of Dust.

U.S. Postage Stamp Honors Shop Customers!

2006-08-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Postal Service has issued this stamp featuring the first and so far only people known to have purchased Zymoglyphic-branded apparel from the museum shop. This daring couple plunged into unknown retail waters some 2 1/2 years ago and are now rewarded with owning a pearl of great rarity, as well as being thrust into the avant garde of the fashion world. The resale value of rare Zymoglyphic merchandise is literally incalculable as none has as yet been offered for sale. The couple's name is being withheld in order to forestall any rumors that the shop has yet to make an apparel sale outside the curator's immediate family.

-- Museum Shop Marketing Dept.

Kaolithic Curiosities at the Wonders of the World Museum

2006-08-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

I don't recall exactly what drew me to Port Costa in the late 1970's. It's a tiny town in the outer reaches of the Bay Area, on the road to nowhere else, on a bank of the Sacramento River. Downtown consisted of some old buildings, a relatively large restaurant/bar popular with bikers, and a few antique store/curiosity shops. My attention, however, was immediately drawn to a storefront that housed the Wonders of the World Museum ("Stands Alone on Earth"), presided over by one Dr. George Gladstone.

Wonders indeed. There were many fascinating exhibits, many of which dated from the Pre-Credulous Era of the Bone Age, when fossils metamorphosed into ceramic instead of rock by a process known as Kaolism. Hominids in that age came in a huge variety of sizes. There was an 8-foot high Bigfoot with a triple-jointed penis bone, whose variety of functions Dr. Gladstone described in detail, and a numerous lilliputian race dubbed Homo Ceramicus. Two skulls of the latter were later acquired for the Zymoglyphic Museum's curiosity cabinet. Shown above is a rockpecker, whose skull could be used as stone-shaping tool. As a complement to the fossilization process of Kaolism, I learned how life can be created from mud, albeit with some unusual results.

The visit turned out to be good timing, because the museum was only in existence for a few years. It left a lasting impression on me, though, and when I finally had my own museum, I thought I would seek out the man behind Dr. Gladstone, Clayton Bailey. Three years ago, in July of 2003, I contacted Clayton via e-mail and he was gracious enough to give me a tour of his studio. He still lives in Port Costa, behind a fence topped by ceramic gargoyles of his own making. The big studio contains a large herd of robots, all of which are descended from a single robot originally designed to retrieve specimens for the museum from outer space. Instead, that first robot took over Clayton's brain and commanded him to create more robots. The Kaolithic Curiosities are now resting picturesquely in the yard (see above), maybe to be re-excavated and analyzed by a future generation.

Although seen by some as a "mad scientist", Dr. Gladstone's archaeological research methods have been an inspiration to the Zymoglyphic Museum curatorial staff.

Check out the Ceramic Wonders, especially the face jugs

More photos from 2003

Reference book: Clayton Bailey: Happenings in the circus of life

World's Smallest Viewing Stones Made From Cosmic Dust

2006-08-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

Our director at the Museum of Dust has recently acquired a lovely speck of cosmic dust, and those clever guys in the Zymoglyphic Museum's curatorial department have mounted it as a viewing stone, carrying "miniature" to its logical extreme. The curator has gone the director one better by finding an even smaller cosmic mote, this one a scant eight micrometers high (below). I will leave it to Dir. de Plume to figure out how exactly to incorporate these prizes into the MoD bonsai garden. Obviously they won't take up much room!

Original cosmic dust grains from J. Freitag and S. Messenger via LiveScience.com (top) and D. Brownlee and E. Jessberger via Wikipedia (bottom)

A Mysterious Document Surfaces

2006-08-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum has somewhat of a reputation as a "museum of decay" (undoubtedly a factor in its recent targeting by the Museum of Dust). A mysterious document has recently surfaced that may or may not help explain the origins of this phenomenon. This loose notebook page was found deep in the curator's personal archives. It appears to be the record of some sort of archeological dig, apparently in his closet. The manual timestamp on the document indicates that the dig was most likely in preparation for leaving home and heading off to college a continent away.

Here is a literal transcription of the document:

2 very stale pieces of bread w/casts of pupae, presumably carpet beetles, as dead same found there also. Open can, no mold on bread
Cardboard can w/mistletoe, dead and moldy
Separate substance so moldy as to be unrecognizable
Piece of wrapped cheese, brown liquidy and stinking like hell
Dried leaf of lichen, brown but not moldy
Plastic dish with spoon and white powder
Nylon plankton net
Mold on plate under glass, indicating square outline of something that had been there. No smell.
Jar with moldy prunes - now only moldy pits are left & some gunk on sides & bottom of jar. No smell. Rotting for many years
Old spider nests in jars found in closet - explains spiders in here. Jar w/bread(?) explains beetles. Now how did sow bugs get in here?

Surrealist Barbie

2006-07-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

In primitive societies, there are often particular figurines considered to have great power within the culture. For us, the Barbie doll seems to serve that function. Such is the power of this figurine that she has managed to stay trendy for more than 50 years in the ever-changing worlds of fashion and toys. She has even penetrated the august halls of the Zymoglyphic Museum, where current events are rarely acknowledged and brand names hardly ever seen.

My niece went through a fairly heavy Barbie phase in her pre-teen years. One Christmas when we were visiting, she presented me with this rearranged doll which is now enshrined as the ultra-rare Surrealist Barbie of the museum's curiosity cabinet. It is still exactly as she gave it to me. Later, she sent me some heads and a few body parts for me to use in art projects (see note below). Then, no doubt inspired by her visit to the museum, she created Nude Barbie-zilla.

It turns out that deconstructing Barbies is practically a cottage industry. The prevalence of girls mutilating their Barbies in various ways was the subject of a recent study at the University of Bath. The Market Street Gallery in San Francisco hosting the fourth annual Altered Barbies show with more than 50 artists participating. It runs through August 27th.

A Fictocryptic Museum

2006-07-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Jurassic Technology has recently been enmeshed in the Museum of Dust's acquisition spree (a fate which befell the Zymoglyphic Museum not so long ago), with the MoD director proclaiming the MJT to be the "grandparent of all modern fictocryptic establishments".

I had heard about this museum for many years and had seen some of its traveling exhibits. I finally was able to visit it in person when I went to Los Angeles last August. The museum is often referred to as a "curiosity cabinet", which is generally a haphazard collection of interesting stuff, but the MJT model is really more an instructive academic museum with professional-looking exhibits, each examining some esoteric phenomenon in great detail. In this museum, however, the phenomena described may or may not be fictional, and the way the line is straddled is subtle enough to keep you guessing even when you know what is going on. The book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology details one writer's attempt to cut through the fog of uncertainty surrounding the museum. It is, in a way, a highly rarefied version of a circus sideshow, where some of the freaks are real and some are not, but what really matters is the atmosphere created.

"Is this place real or what?"
"It's here, isn't it?"

--Conversation overheard at the MJT, October 2000, quoted in this article

To me, the fascination of the MJT is the pure physical presence of the place, its dark lighting, well-crafted vitrines, surreal dioramas, and labyrinthine exhibit rooms, including a theater and a tea room. The image above is from a Flickr photoset of the MJT by The Blen that gives you a good sense of what the museum is like. It's interesting to compare the MJT with Steven Millhauser's Barnum Museum which, being made entirely of words, is not subject to any physical laws.

While not truly an inspiration for the Zymoglyphic Museum, there has been some pollination wafting our way from the southland. The physical existence of the Zymoglyphic Museum is important, in that it exists in a geographic location and has real objects in it, but there is more of an emphasis on outreach through photography and web presence than on perfecting the physical exhibit space. The Lower Jurassic is much more technologically oriented than the Zymoglyphic culture, which tends toward rust and decay anyway. The Zymoglyphic Museum, like the MJT, has sometimes been accused of lax standards in the factual accuracy of its presentations (which it can neither confirm nor deny), and both may ultimately turn out to be physical manifestations of the internal worlds of their creators.

Museum Shop - Staff Announcement

2006-07-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum Shop is pleased to announce a new addition to its staff. Cheeky Pete the Clown is now in charge of the shop's drinkware division. He comes to the museum through the joint good graces of Shad McConnell of Portland, Oregon, and Judith Hoffman, of San Mateo, California, to whom the museum is greatly indebted. Mr. Clown faces a considerable challenge as the museum shop has not as yet sold a single mug or stein. However, we believe his seemingly eternal optimism will help to turn the situation around, preferably a full 360 degrees. In addition, we are confident that staff and patrons will now refrain making insensitive references to "those clowns running the shop". Visitors to the museum may rest assured that, like many celebrities, Mr. Clown is much smaller in person.

-- The Museum Staff

Natural Modernism in Sculpture

2006-07-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

Recent posts here on Andy Goldsworthy and Hubert Duprat have covered collaborations between nature and people to make art. This is a common theme in Zymoglyphic culture, where the motto for artists is "Let nature do the detail work." The sculptures shown here are a collaboration among a boring clam (boring in that it drills holes, not that it is uninteresting), the sea, and a human eye and hand to select and arrange the results. The clam in question (a specimen from the museums's collection is shown here) is also known as a piddock. It is more torpedo-shaped than clam-shaped and has the ability to rasp its way into rock using the ridges on its shell and a rotating motion. It uses the holes it creates for protection. When the rock is broken up by erosion (often aided by the weakening of the rock by the clam holes themselves), the resulting fragments are worn smooth by wave action and cast up on the shore. The results often bear an uncanny resemblance to that archetype of modernist sculpture, the 3-dimensional free-form blob with one or more holes in it. These are prized by Zymoglyphic collectors. Some the museum's specimens of this type of natural art are featured in the Shoebox Art Galleries 1 and 2. Two of those sculptures have been gathered here for the group portrait; the rest are making their internet debut.

These sculptures can be seen as Modern Age descendants of the miniature viewing stones that were so popular during the Zymoglyphic region's Era of Oriental Influence. The boring clams themselves have their place alongside the Xenophora in the Zymoglyphic pantheon of molluscan artists. The clams are seen as true "sculptors", rather than, like the Xenophora, assemblers of found objects.

"Designer" Jewelry with Insect Larvae

2006-07-06T11:55:00.000-07:00

Caddis flies live near ponds and streams. As larvae, they live underwater and make wearable tubes from local materials, such as twigs, sand, stones, or snail shells. The items they select are bound with silk and the larva hooks itself inside with the end of its abdomen. They are thus candidates for our stable of "natural assemblage artists" which include the bowerbirds and the Xenophora. The tubes serve various purposes - stones can be added to increase traction in fast-moving streams; irregular twigs make the tube (and its inhabitant) difficult for a trout to swallow. This may be considered more engineering than artistry, but in this case nature has a human collaborator. French artist Hubert Duprat has developed a method of getting the larvae to use more upscale materials, such as gold flakes, pearls, and sapphires, which would of course have no practical benefit in the wild and thus gets much closer to "art". Here is an interview with the artist as he describes the process in detail, and he and an art critic discuss whether there is actually a creative contribution from the insect in this "collaboration".

Here are some examples of what the caddis fly larvae build on their own:

from Scotland's Hunterian Museum Animal Architecture Collection

From the book Animal Artisans

Bowerbirds: Assemblage Artists of the Jungle!

2006-07-01T08:56:00.001-07:00

While some may question whether Xenophora, the shells that collect and arrange shells, are truly "Assemblage Artists of the Deep", as the Zymoglyphic Museum claims, bowerbirds can make a much stronger claim to the title of "artist". These birds live in the rain forests of New Guinea and northern Australia. Males use sticks to build bowers, which are staging areas for their collections of interesting objects. They arrange these objects in particular ways to entice females, who are the judges of quality, to mate. Their selection of objects has remarkable overlap with Zymoglyphic art - snail shells, bones, small skulls, moss, fungus, dead bugs, flowers, and the occasional interesting plastic figure. One bird was even found to collect skeletonized leaves! Each individual bird has his own style, often preferring, for example, that all objects in an arrangement be a particular color, or a pair of colors.

David Attenborough has produced an excellent documentary on these birds. My favorite part is when he proves that the birds don't just collect these objects, but are are quite particular about the arrangement of them - he moves a few of the objects around when the bird is off somewhere, and when the bird comes back, it cocks its head quizzically at the disturbed objects and puts them back where it had them originally. There is also a sequence in which he compares the birds' elaborate stick bowers with a stick pile made by artist Andy Goldsworthy. You can see that clip here. The last part of the film shows the influence of the modern age on bowerbird art. In more urbanized settings, they collecting all manner of plastic toys and shiny things for their arrangements.

The documentary is available in the US as Nova - Flying Casanovas. In the UK, it is included on the BBC DVD "Attenborough in Paradise".

The photo above is from Animal Artisans

Skulduggery and Intrigue in the Museum World

2006-06-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum has been targeted by the Museum of Dust for a hostile takeover. We recognize that due to staffing shortages the Zymoglyphic Museum's cleanliness may not be up to snuff (and noting that some staff believe that the accumulated dust enhances, rather than detracts from, the exhibits, by lending them a certain air of authenticity and credbility), and that the museum does indeed have a high concentration of desirable rust and decay, and further that the museum, as with all things, must eventually return to dust. Still, we had not expected it to come so soon. The museum's board is meeting even now to assess the threat.

The facts we have so far are these: The Museum of Dust's director goes by the highly suspicious name of Incognita Nom de Plume, or some variation thereof, and has an implausibly long personal history, involving an arachnoid accomplice (who sounds dangerous) and a mysterious entity called "Musrum" whose museum seems destined to suffer a fate similar to our own. We suspect this cabal may be associated with the equally shadowy Athanasius Kircher "Society", of which Kircher himself is the recording secretary and apparently its only member. Kircher had his own museum in Rome over 300 years ago (reduced to dust by now), and had not been heard from since then until he entered the modern age by becoming, like so many others, a blogger.

We will be sifting through the evidence for further clues.

-- Museum Staff

Andy Goldsworthy's Collaborations with Nature

2006-06-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

As I noted last week, in David Attenborough's documentaries, the natural world is teeming, bizarre place of baroque mating rituals, predation, and survival. A more bucolic view of nature is one that looks at the beauty in natural forms and patterns. One of the themes in Zymoglyphic culture is making art from natural objects, often with minimal transformation. Andy Goldsworthy is the purest Western practitioner of the craft of arranging natural materials into art forms. Usually, it is a matter of lightly imposing some human abstraction - a circle, spiral, or an unnatural crack - in a natural landscape to somehow achieve a magical effect. Some of his creations are permanent installations in stone, but most are ephemeral structures of ice, leaves, water, sticks or the crackles in drying mud. For these, his photographs become the final creative product and only remaining evidence of the work. The photographs in turn are available in a series of high-quality books. A good survey is Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature.

A lesser-known type of work that he does are "snowball paintings", which are created by putting a snowball stained with a natural dye on paper and letting it melt. The result is an amazingly detailed pattern created by the way the dye is deposited as the snow melts and the water evaporates. A detail from one is shown here, with an enlargement here. The Zymoglyphic acrylic paintings achieve a similar effect from the deposition patterns of the (unnatural) acrylic pigment.

An additional dimension to Goldsworthy's work is provided in the excellent documentary Rivers & Tides, which shows his work in a context of time and motion that you don't see as much in the still photographs. A pile of sticks by the shore is demolished bit by bit by the tides; a string of leaves snakes its way lazily down a creek.

He has two permanent installations in the Bay Area. One is Stone River in front of the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University campus, and the other
is at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.

Life in the Undergrowth

2006-06-11T13:34:00.000-07:00

In the Alice books, Lewis Carroll presents reality as pretty boring compared to the world of imagination and dreams. The dreams, of course, may turn out to be rather nightmarish. David Attenborough makes nature documentaries which advance the thesis that the natural world is actually truly amazing if you get down and take a look at it. His latest series, Life in the Undergrowth, focuses on terrestrial invertebrates. It includes a giant centipede in Venezuela that catches and eats bats, a spider that catches its prey by swinging a silk line with sticky mucus on the end, and leaf cutter ants that eat a particular fungus that they grow on the leaf bits that they gather. Strange eating and mating behaviors are not limited to creatures in exotic locales. Shown here, for example, are two leopard slugs (common pests in gardens) mating while hanging from a tree on a thread of mucus. The blue parts are entwined genitalia, and both are hermaphrodites. Like Wonderland, this world has its nightmarish elements as well, usually deriving from the basic horror of animals eating other animals alive.

There is a nice book companion to the series, and a web site with video clips, including the slug mating sequence.

David Attenborough would make an excellent guide to the Zymoglyphic regions as well. He has great qualifications - he had a little museum when he was a boy, and now has huge collection of souvenirs from his travels. He is a perfect mixture of authoritativeness, enthusiasm, wonder, and a taste for the bizarre. A phrase he often uses is "and the strangest of all is this one...". He combines all that with the latest technical wizardry in closeup photography and has an engaging personal style. He is always on the scene, often windblown or out of breath, battling mosquitos to sneak up on some hapless creature. He keeps up with recent discoveries, so each series often includes some new odd animal, plant, or behavior that I have not heard about. He has covered a full range of biological and anthropological themes, and he has managed to contribute to science without having to specialize. He always has interesting ideas on the interconnectedness of things; not just describing some odd behavior, but explaining what forces have caused it to evolve that way. If he is not available for the job (as is likely), he can still serve as a role model!

Alice and Me in Wonderland

2006-06-03T13:36:00.000-07:00

I must have seen the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland on TV when she and I were the same age. I watched it again just recently and remembered how spooky it was, especially the Cheshire cat. The poor girl, it seemed to me, was just trying to get along in the this strange world and no one will help her; they can only speak in riddles and nonsense.

In high school I discovered Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. I was fascinated by the fact that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician and logician, and that the Alice stories were full of logical conundrums, linguistic inventions, propositional calculus and chess strategy. I also liked the way Carroll captured dream logic. In one scene, Alice is in a shop trying to focus on an interesting item on a shelf, but it is always on the next shelf above. When she tries to trap it at the top, it disappears through the ceiling.

I was quite tickled when the Jefferson Airplane had a hit with White Rabbit, since it was based on what I was then seeing as an rather intellectual exercise. In college, the Disney film was in heavy rotation at campus film fests. Alice, her mushrooms, and the "hookah-smoking caterpillar" had now become psychedelic icons, the rabbit hole a gateway to an alternate reality. Like Carroll, I was equally fascinated by math and logic, and by the free form view of reality that nonsense provided.

This whole reminiscence of Alice started when I watched Jan Svankmajer's film, Alice. In this version a mostly-live-action Alice (sometimes transformed into a doll) chases a taxidermied rabbit that has broken out of its case and is leaking sawdust as he runs. She is beset along the way by an amazing variety of monsters and chimeras, such as he one shown above.

For more about this film, see here (video clips), here (part of a large Alice site) and here (detailed commentary)

Open Studios 2006 Report

2006-05-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

The annual public opening of the museum has come and gone, although readers may still make arrangements for a visit. There was a good turnout considering the relative isolation of the site and a freakish rainstorm which, for some reason, after weeks of clear weather, pummeled the area on those two days only.

This event is a unique opportunity for me see how people react to the museum and its contents. Considering the number of skulls, dead animals, and unnaturally large insects used, I'm surprised that only a few people find it gross and most find it amusing or even whimsical. Nearly all would agree, I'm sure, that it is at least "different". Kids especially enjoy it - one was particularly absorbed in the dioramas and couldn't stop laughing. On a previous event, two little girls played "I spy", trying to find some obscure object in a diorama. Curious neighbors come by. Best of all, people offer me odd things that they have collected and don't know what to do with. I think the work often appeals to people who probably would never go to a museum or art gallery. Ultimately, I would like people to be inspired to do something creative with their own collections and things that they feel compelled to pick up, not feeling that they need to have art skills or training.

For more on the event from another perspective, see here

Museum to be Open to the Public May 20-21

2006-05-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum will be open to the public May 20th and 21st as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios!

For a formal invitation to the festivities in PDF format, click here.

Previous visitors will be pleased to note that there have been a number of new acquisitions since the last opening a year ago. These include five new artifacts, two curiosity collections, and a set of acrylic paintings. In addition, the museum's recently expanded crab collection will be on display. You may refer here for a preview of the recent acquisitions.

Also on site will be the delectable metalwork and artist's books of Judith Hoffman

You may wish to make your visit part of a more comprehensive tour of the Peninsula's Open Studios. Click here for information. Tour maps and catalogs will be available at the museum.

-- The museum staff

Alexander Calder's Inventive Influence

2006-04-21T18:36:00.000-07:00

I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last weekend to see the "Surreal Calder" show. I had seen the big centennial Calder show there in 1998, so this trip was more like visiting old friends than seeing something new. If you have not seen his work in person, it is definitely worth the trip. The show is up until May 21, and there is a bonus concurrent exhibition of Surrealist photography.

Calder has been a source of inspiration for me for many years. His work has a playful quality. The mobiles for which he is best known are an elegant combination of art, physics, and engineering; compostional balance, for example, is connected to physical balance. By relying on air currents to power them he makes visible the invisible medium that surrounds us (unfortunately, in the museum setting, the "mobiles" don't move).

He also made wire sculptures, a sort of line drawing in three dimensions. His head portraits in wire are especially interesting to see in person because of the way they change as you look at them from different angles.

His "surrealist objects" often combine sticks, wood, or stone with biomorphic, amoeboid abstractions. It's interesting to compare the "Apple Monster", shown here, with the "Spirit Figure" in the de Young Museum's New Guinea collection.

This show also includes a sort of "curiosity cabinet", an alcove containing a selection of objects that he had in his studio, including a large thigh bone, a fish-shaped plate, and figurines.

For more information on Calder, see the Calder Foundation page.
A comprehensive catalog of his work: Alexander Calder, 1898-1976
Also recommended is the 1976 book Calder's Universe

The new incarnation of the de Young Museum in San Francisco

2006-04-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

We headed up to Golden Gate Park to visit the de Young Museum last weekend. It was the latest in a long series of wet days. We stopped off first at the hundred-year-old Japanese Tea Garden next door. The cherry trees were blooming, the moss was thick and glistening in the rain, and the raindrops made rings in the ponds. The garden is a sublime example of creating art from nature. As you walk the paths, each turn creates a new picture, a composition of mossy rocks, water, pagodas, and plants, even incorporating the surrounding cypresses and pines. In contrast, the de Young museum is a brand new building, a completely rebuilt version of the old museum on the same site. The approach is along an unnecessarily narrow sidewalk hunched up against the external wall of the museum, which is a featureless monolith with no protective eaves. At the door, you are forced to stand in line in the rain to go through a security check. Once you are in, you can take a stairway down to the special exhibit area with steps which are too wide for a single step and too narrow for two so that you have to sort of limp your way down.

According to the museum's history page, the de Young, founded in 1895, was originally a curiosity cabinet of sorts, housed in an Egyptian style edifice.

During the next twenty years [de Young's] taste for the curious, intricate, and ornamental was reflected by acquisitions of painting and sculpture, arms and armor, fine porcelain, objects from South Pacific and American Indian cultures, including original art objects as well as reproductions. Visitors to the museum seem to have shared de Young's interest in such diverse objects as sculptures, polished tree slabs, paintings, a door reputedly from Newgate Prison, birds' eggs, handcuffs and thumbscrews, as well as two cases de Young had at last filled with a collection of knives and forks.

This ended in the 1930's:

[Longtime museum director] Dr. Heil chose to tactfully refuse personal keepsakes and household bric-a-brac, ending any perception of the de Young as the city's attic.

Pity. The city could use an attic!

In the early 1960's, the de Young decided to "de-accession" some of its holdings that were not part of its more modern focus on art, antiquities, and ethnographic artifacts. My dad, then a biology teacher at City College, was there, and picked up these two taxidermied birds, which are now part of the Zymoglyphic Museum's collection, creating a nostalgic link with museum history.

The evolution of the de Young is not all negative, however. It has always had an excellent collection of African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian artifacts and has recently acquired a large private collection of artifacts from New Guinea. This collection was the highlight of the trip. Shown here are "spirit figures" from Papua, dated at a few hundred years old. The label says:

Imunu are unique spirit figures obtained from the root of the Mangrove tree. A carver or spirit man dreams of an image and the goes to "find it" in the forest. A similar tradition is found among certain Inuit people, where the shaman dreams an image and then seeks it out among the driftwood on the beach

The collection is nicely documented in the book New Guinea Art: Masterpieces of the Jolika Collection from Marcia And John Friede

Robert Hudson's Wild Constructions

2006-04-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

I took advantage last weekend of a rare sunny day to motor on up to the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa for a retrospective of Robert Hudson's work. Hudson has been working in the Bay area since the 1960's, creating works that are a wildly improbable mix of elements - taxidermy, brightly colored paint, welded steel, furniture, geometric elements, farm tools, natural objects like sticks and antlers, ceramics that look like sticks and rocks, wire, rusty metal, pictures, and a variety of both unusual and ordinary found objects. Somehow it all works together in a way that creates a complex but balanced and unified object. To me it is a curiosity cabinet approach that ends up as a constructed sculpture, an integrated object instead of just a collection of objects.

Works shown are "Outrigger" (1984) and "Panoramic Vision" (1996). Hudson has only a scattered internet presence. The best reference for his work is the catalog of his 1985 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Robert Hudson: A Survey

A Traveling Crustacean Mini-diorama

2006-03-25T19:27:00.000-08:00

Last summer I was invited to participate in a project called The Curiosity Cabinet of the Collective Unconscious. The "cabinet" in question was an old library card catalog. Each participant got a drawer in which to create something having to do with the "collective unconscious". In mine, I ended up making a diorama featuring a little family of 3 crab carapaces in a wooded setting (shown here - click for larger view). I mostly work by just putting things together, often precariously, carrying them out to the museum, and possibly having to repair them when Open Studios rolls around. This was the first time that I had made something that needed to be shipped somewhere. The crabs had wires for legs, so they could be secured fairly easily, and the rest was glued or wired down. It was worth it to me to be part of a collaborative project, which was a welcome change for me.
The drawer had its debut with the rest of the cabinet at the Hive Gallery in August, which provided me with a good excuse to go down to L.A. for an extended weekend. The cabinet then traveled to Burning Man in September to become part of a funhouse that was installed in the base of the Man. The cabinet must have survived the inevitable fiery immolation of its host, as it has recently surfaced again at Create:Fixate in Los Angeles.

Thong Controversy

2006-03-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

In a misguided attempt to "sex up" the museum shop's offerings and get sales moving from their current abysmal numbers, the museum's marketing department has decided to offer Zymoglyphic-branded thongs for sale. These items feature the same "flying-mummified-mouse" design which has proved so unpopular for the hats. This idea immediately ran into trouble with the Good Taste Review Board, which nixed the accompanying marketing campaign. However, the thong is still available for purchase. As a special treat for "behind-the-scenes" web log readers, the proposed campaign may be seen here. The models are "The Three Graces" by Raphael. The background image is taken from Wikipedia which states that the image may be "freely...exploited in any way by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial". We have taken "exploited" fairly literally here. Our spokesmodel Ileana, shown here, is not sure what to make of all this.

-- Museum Staff

A Fantasy Museum Made Entirely of Words

2006-03-05T18:07:00.000-08:00

While reminiscing about Ferdinand Cheval's "ideal palace" in the last entry, I was reminded of Steven Millhauser's story "The Barnum Museum", in the book by the same name. It is not so much a story as a 20-page description of a fantastic museum of the imagination. The scene is set:

The Barnum museum is located in the heart of our city, two blocks north of the financial district. The Romanesque and Gothic entranceways, the paired sphinxes and griffins, the gilded onion domes, the corbeled turrets and mansarded towers, the octagonal cupolas, the crestings and crenellations, all these compose an elusive design that seems calculated to lead the eye restlessly from point to point without permitting it to take in the whole. in fact the structure is so difficult to grasp that we cannot tell whether the Barnum Museum is a single complex building with numerous wings, annexes, additions, and extensions, or whether is it many buildings artfully connected by roofed walkways, stone bridges, flowering arbors, booth-lined arcades, colonnaded passageways.

He goes on to describe the rooms and the exhibits, the Hall of Mermaids, the three subterranean levels, the Chamber of False Things, and even rooms full of ordinary objects.
Even the gift shop is full of wonders:

Old sepia postcards of mermaids and sea dragons...mysterious rubber balls from Arabia that bounce once and remain suspended in the air...shiny red boxes that vanish in direct sunlight...Those who disapprove of the Barnum Museum do not spare the gift shops, which they say are dangerous. For they say it is here that the museum, which by its nature is contemptuous of our world, connects to that world by the act of buying and selling, and indeed insinuates itself into our lives by means of apparently innocent knickknacks carried off in the pockets of children.

Millhauser is one of my favorite writers, a wonderful blend of fantasy and literariness. His stories cover areas of interest to fans of the wondrous, such as automatons, illusionists, vast underground complexes, endless department stores, huge amusement parks, as well as vignettes of ordinary life.

In an interview, he says:

What interests me — not exclusively, but in relation to the monstrous — is the place where the familiar begins to turn strange. When things cease to be themselves, when they begin to turn into something else, which has no name — that is a region I'm always drawn to. This, I think, accounts for my interest in night scenes, in childhood, in bands of prowling adolescent girls, in underground and attic places, in obsession, in heightened states of awareness. In this sense, it might easily be argued that the wondrous and the monstrous are very much the same.

Ferdinand Cheval and Le Palais Ideal

2006-03-05T15:50:00.000-08:00

This entry was inspired by the Athanasius Kircher Society's "Visionary Architecture Week" and its coverage of the "Palais Ideal" in southeastern France. The palace was built by Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) over a period of some 33 years and it has been number one on my must-see list for many years. He built it using stones gathered on his rounds as a postman, as well as creating his own forms. I finally made a pilgrimage here in the fall of 2002. It is a wonder to behold. It contains a melange of architectural styles (real and imagined) with columns, arches, turrets, passageways, terraces, and giant statues. Inside and out are grottoes, galleries, rock gardens, and all manner of organic plant and animal creations emerging from it.

The Surrealists were fond of it, especially Andre Breton, who proclaimed Cheval as one of his own. Cheval has an entry in the Concise Encyclopedia of Surrealism which says, "The fantastic style of the palace...was often referred to by the Surrealists as an example of dream-life entering the real world."

A number of quotes from him were published in issue 38 of Raw Vision as an autobiography of sorts. He says:

I used to build a fairy-like palace [in my] imagination with all that the genius of a humble man could conceive (with grottoes, towers, gardens, castles, museums and sculptures) ...It so happened that just when my dream was gradually sinking in the mists of oblivion suddenly an incident brought it all back to me: I stumbled on a stone that nearly made me fall. I wanted to examine it closely, my stumbling block: its shape was so bizarre that I picked it up and took it away with me. The following day I went back to the same place and I found more beautiful stones which, gathered on the spot, looked so pretty and filled me with enthusiasm. Then I said to myself: ‘Since Nature provided me with sculptures I shall become an architect and a mason (besides who isn’t a bit of a mason?).'

Among the many details of the palace, one aspect that was of particular interest to me was his display of interesting stones. The inspiring "stumbling block" he mentions can be seen here, perched on a pedestal on an upper terrace, just as any viewing stone might be. A particularly intricate and organic rock has been framed in its own grotto like a religious icon. Some of the rocks which he found contained fossils and other pictorial elements. They are on display together in another nook as the "Museum of Antediluvian Stones".

A comprehensive and well-illustrated documentation of the palace is
Le palais idéal du facteur Cheval: Quand le songe devient la réalité (Collection "Les Bâtisseurs inspirés") (text in French). This book may also be found at amazon.fr.

Photographs shown here by Jim Stewart, copyright 2002
For more photos, see here
For visiting information, see the official site

The Zymoglyphic Meteorite

2006-02-26T11:22:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy, I would troll the beach with a magnet tied to a long string, hoping to snag a torn-off bit of the cosmos in the form of an iron meteorite. As an adult, I found out that if you want one, you can just buy one. This one is from the Gibeon fall, a meteor that broke apart over Namibia in prehistoric times. It was originally part of the iron core of an asteroid that later broke up. Its melted, pitted exterior marks its fiery passage through the Earth's atmosphere, but its inner crystalline structure has not changed in 4 billion years. To me, it is the equivalent of a medieval relic, a connection to the universe and its creation.

One of the holiest relics of Islam (and its predecessors in Arabia as well) is a meteorite embedded in its central shrine at Mecca. One legend has it that this stone, too, dates from close to creation, falling at Adam's feet and subsequently discovered by Abraham.

The Hall of Meteorites in New York's American Museum of Natural History has an excellent exhibit (virtual and physical) on meteorites.

Michael McMillen's Dioramas

2006-02-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

We went down to the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara last weekend to see Michael McMillen's latest installation, Red Trailer Motel. It will be on view until March 18, 2006. If you go, be sure to walk on the gravel, get up close to the doors and peer into the peepholes!

Michael has a long history of creating both full-size and miniature dioramas, always amazing, involving found objects and set pieces that he has constructed. We were fortunate enough to catch his big show at the Oakland Museum in 1991.

For a good overview of his work, see here. One of the interviews there takes place in his yard, where "stuff" has been accumulating for decades. More details of the Red Trailer Motel can be seen here at his Los Angeles gallery's site.

Permanent installations of his work can be found in the following locations:
- The Los Angeles County Museum has "Central Meridian", AKA "the garage", an amazing walk-through assemblage of a garage that is part Egyptian temple. See here for an interview with him that takes place in the garage.
- The entrance to the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena has "Motel (Under the World)" featuring an oil-guzzling robot watching TV in his underground room
- The San Jose Museum of Art has The Third Eye, a peephole into a sixties head shop
- The Oakland Museum has Aristotle's Cage, an evocative miniature diorama of a trailer in the desert.

Karl Blossfeldt

2006-02-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

Neva Beach has graciously donated to the museum 13 prints from the 1929 edition of Karl Blossfeldt's Urformen der Kunst, along with a nice assortment of rusty metal and gnarly driftwood. Blossfeldt is featured in the museum's Photographers of the Marvelous online exhibit. The Blossfeldt prints form a major enhancement to the museum's photography collection. An online version of the book may be seen here. Blossfeldt's photography has been an inspiration to the museum's staff photographer, who envies Blossfeldt's ability to give a monumental, architectural presence to small scale natural objects - a major goal in photographing, for example, the museum's small dioramas and viewing stones.
An excellent book: Karl Blossfeldt: 1865-1932 (Photo Book Series)

-- The Museum Staff

Mom's dream

2006-02-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

My mother is now elderly and frail, but possesses a great independence of spirit. Her vision is failing and her world is getting smaller. She says she rarely remembers her dreams, but recently she told me of a particularly vivid one. She was in a museum with many rooms and great curving walls, but open to the sky. My brother and I were both there, about 10 years old. Lots of people were coming in, but no one was going out as there did not appear to be any exit. The museum was full of exquisite objects, absorbingly beautiful, even indescribable. When she looked around, my brother and I had gone, and she could not find us anywhere.

Recommended Museums

2006-01-29T17:03:00.000-08:00

The ideal museum would be a comprehensive collection of dioramas, art, antiquities, natural history items, anthropological artifacts, medical preparations, mechanical wonders, and curiosities of all kinds, including items of questionable authenticity. These would all be piled floor to ceiling, room after room, wonder upon wonder. A new annotated museum guide has been added to the Zymoglyphic Museum Web site. It lists museums and similar institutions in Europe and on the American coasts where elements of this ideal museum may be found. Shown here is the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England.

Readers are welcome to nominate other institutions for inclusion on this list.

-- The Museum Staff

Museum Shop - 2005 Financial Report

2006-01-27T20:42:00.000-08:00

The 2005 sales figures for the museum shop have been tallied. The actual value is a closely guarded secret; however, we can say that it is in the low two digits. The actual number of items sold could reportedly be counted, with little effort, on the fingers on one hand. The bonus for purchasers of museum merchandise is that any items that are purchased are likely to become collector's items due to their extreme rarity (this according to the marketing department). However, we can report that positive steps are being taken. New items have been added to the roster of merchandise. In 2005, we hired a winsome spokesmodel, Ileana, shown here reacting to the financial news. At the shop, she turns on the charm to show museum patrons just how fashionable our merchandise can be. Customers may rest assured that if she is wearing it, it is indeed in the best of taste.

-- The Museum Staff

Painting

2006-01-22T17:08:00.000-08:00

In creating assemblage works from natural objects, I often think of having a sort of partnership, where I provide the overall idea and "let nature do the detail work". Natural objects often have a complex texture to them that remains interesting even at very close range. I started thinking that I could do some painting to make underwater diorama backgrounds - ideally the sort of atmosphere evoked by the paintings of Yves Tanguy (such as the one shown here). I took some classes on the basics of acrylic painting from Tesia Blackburn. I made some tiny paintings with interesting textures and became fascinated with making amoebas out of tar gel. The results are showcased in the Shoebox Art Gallery #3.

Last fall, I took a class at the Pacific Art League with Nancy Rice who makes large abstract paintings using a sort of pour-and-shake technique. I discovered that if I did something similar on Masonite board, the pigment deposit made an amazingly detailed pattern, consistent with my "let nature do the detail work" plan. I decided that some of the resulting paintings were interesting enough to be displayed on their own, and that the collaboration with natural processes qualified them as the Zymoglyphic art of the new millenium.

The story of how the museum came to be

2006-01-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

The museum's curator has been kind enough to submit a personal history of the Zymoglyphic Museum from its humble beginnings as a 10 year old's natural history museum and zoo to the vibrant melange that you see today. The catalog of holdings from that first museum still survives today, and a page from it is shown here.

-- The Museum Staff

Museum article in Matrix magazine

2006-01-08T13:02:00.001-08:00

The museum is pleased to announce its first foray into the print world! Issue #72 of Matrix (Fall 2005) has just been published with a three-page article on the museum, as part of the "New Victorians" theme of the issue. The article includes eight color photographs of objects from the collections, with explanatory text. Matrix is a longtime Canadian literary and art magazine published in Montreal.

The text of the article was submitted by the museum at the magazine editor's request. It is an abbreviated version of an ongoing museum project, a printed guide to the museum and its collections.

-- The Museum Staff

Is it art?

2005-12-31T16:13:00.000-08:00

When people find out that there is a museum in my driveway, they often want to know what it is about. I like to have a supply of business cards with me so I can hand them one and say "It's hard to explain - just go to the Web site". This blog is an attempt to do some explaining and comments are welcome.

The museum started out as a collection of objects that seemed interesting in themselves but were even more interesting when combined together, either in little scenes or as new objects. The scenes became dioramas and the objects gathered into collections and exhibits; eventually the museum came into existence. As art, it would be considered "assemblage art", but the museum is not really part of the art world - I feel more kinship with "outsider" artists who are simply creating without regard for art world status or making a living at it.

A peek behind the scenes

2005-12-31T11:38:00.000-08:00

The Zymoglyphic Museum is an attempt to tie together many themes and variations into a coherent whole. It is part curiosity cabinet, part shrine, part alter ego, and part alchemist's laboratory. Its fields of study encompass art (high and low brow), science, and spirituality. The museum's curator has graciously (if somewhat reluctantly) agreed to pull aside the veil of mystery surrounding the museum and provide regular reports on various aspects of the museum's history and current projects. We hope to get him to reveal some secrets of how the museum's exhibits are made and maybe even what they mean. The accompanying photograph shows the museum's exhibit development area.

-- The Museum Staff

New Painting Gallery!

2005-11-27T13:23:00.000-08:00

The museum has opened a new gallery to house a recently acquired batch of acrylic paintings. These paintings represent a new direction in Zymoglyphic art away from found-object assembage, but in keeping with the theme of the "Primordial Ooze".