Saturday, August 11, 2007
The Rainbow Jewel from Another Planet
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, .
Categories:
Museum history,
Museum objects,
Other Museums,
Personal anecdotes
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Open Studios Report
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.
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