Creating 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 at the Book Arts Jam or may be downloaded in PDF format here

New Book: The Tale of the Wandering Monk

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.

Two New Books and a Book Arts Jam

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

27 Views of the Zymoglyphic Region

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.

Museum Guide now available!

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