MUSEUM FATIGUE

Mystery Object #12: Flesh Crayon

September 21, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Antique stores are useful repositories for objects that evoke memories of the past. Nearly every time I visit an antique store I am confronted with a few objects that evoke things long forgotten. Sometimes I find objects from a time before I was born that confound me with their alien common-sense assumptions. About a week before fall semester started, on the way back from a canoe trip, we stopped in an antique store in Lindstrom, Minnesota. While looking through the […]

Categories: Antiques, Mystery Objects, Nostalgia, Play, Race • Tags: antiques, Crayola, Crayons, flesh crayon

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Detroit and the Aral Sea

September 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] A few weeks ago when we visited Detroit, all I could think about was the Aral Sea. Why would a visit to […]

Categories: End of Times, Environment, Essays, Representation • Tags: Aral Sea, Detroit, disaster

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Protection in the Nuclear Age

September 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“In this uneasy age in which we live, strife abounds in many troubled parts of the world. The weapons of modern warfare have become increasingly powerful and numerous…In the face of this threat, a strong civil defense is needed not only throughout government, but on the part of the individual and the family.” In the final throes of preparing for this semester, while digging though some readings for a class, I came across a small booklet that I collected a […]

Categories: Books, End of Times, Gear, Memory, Mystery Objects, Retro • Tags: Civil Defense, civil preparedness, Department of Defense, fallout shelter, Fallout Shelter Design, Nuclear Age, Nuclear Attack, Survival

Oriental Torture Cabinet

September 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

For folks in the Twin Cities the last weeks of August leading up to Labor Day is the time for the “Great Minnesota Get Together”—The Minnesota State Fair. Perhaps on of the only rituals truly shared by a large diverse cross section of Minnesotans, the fair hosts hundreds of thousands of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. It brings together rural and urban, old and young, people of different ethnic and cultural groups, new immigrants and old. It is […]

Categories: Bodies, Consumption, Exhibitions and Fairs, Gender, Mythologies • Tags: Minnesota State Fair, Orientalism

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The Weight of Creation(ism)

August 31, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“…it is an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliberated reflections upon it…common sense rests its [case] on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.”—Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System” “Wherever we turn, there is the Face of God…” —Harun Yahya Last week a colleague of mine in the Religion […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Education, Mystery Objects, Mythologies, Religion • Tags: adnan oktar, Atlas of Creation, Clifford Geertz, common sense, Creation Museum, Creationism, Global Publishing, Harun Yahya, Richard Dawkins, weight

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On Becoming An Anthropologist (in 1970)

August 26, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Last month, while doing some deep cleaning in our anthropology lab, I came across a small booklet titled On Becoming and Anthropologist: A Career Pamphlet For Students. Prepared by Walter Goldschmidt at UCLA, it was published by the American Anthropological Association in 1970. Its attractive burnt orange color, retro font, and the unidentified “ethnic symbol” on the cover caught my eye. I set it aside, thinking it might be a nice time capsule—a snapshot of what becoming an anthropologist was […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Retro, Scripts, Work • Tags: 1970, American Anthropological Association, career, pamphlet, students

Yungang Grottoes: The Missing Pieces Meet The Big Holes

August 15, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece Hi-dee-ho, here I go lookin’ for my missin’ piece –The Missing Piece (Shel Silverstein, 1976) This afternoon I was doing some cataloging of images when I came across a folder from a few years back. In it I found a few photos from the Yungang Grottoes—a collection of ancient carved buddhist grottoes just outside the city of Datong in Northern China. Every year that I take student […]

Categories: China, Collecting, Museums, Photo Essays, Representation, Tourism • Tags: chinese sculpture, collections, cultural property, Cultural Revolution, Datong, Met, Metropolitan Museum of Art, sculpture, shel silverstein, unesco world heritage site, vandalism, Yungang Grottoes，云冈石窟

Mystery Object #11: Lung Money

August 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

The other day, as I was paying for a cup of coffee in Greenville, Ohio, I looked down to see a most unbelievable thing—a massage raffle for a lung transplant. Let me write that again just in case you missed it the first time: A massage raffle for a lung transplant. Had I been in a bit more of a hurry to pay for my coffee I might not have looked down and read the details of the request: The photocopied […]

Categories: Bodies, Gambling, Healthcare, Mystery Objects, Politics • Tags: health, healthcare, lung transplant, raffle

Mystery Object #10: Brass Private Property Sign

August 3, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Last week, while walking on the sidewalk up the street toward Market Square in Pittsburg, PA, I noticed a small brass plaque mounted in the brick sidewalk at the edge of the street at the corner of Forbes Ave and Delray Street. It simply said, PRIVATE PROPERTY. The brass and brick made the simple message—about the size of a business card—seem proper or even classy. That it was written in all caps and even needed to be there in the first place, however, […]

Categories: Discipline, Mystery Objects, Space, Surveillance • Tags: Occupy Wall Street, Pittsburg

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Post-Apocalyptic Déjà Vu in Gary, Indiana

July 22, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

During our drive through Gary, Indiana we pulled over in front of the dilapidated and boarded up remains of what had once been a supermarket. Standing in the fractured, concrete-and-weed parking lot, facing the building, with its faded paint and busted-out window frames, the strongest sense of déjà vu hit me. I had been there before. I knew what the inside of the store looked like with its dark rows of rusted, toppled shelves and trash-covered floors. When I was thirsty, hadn’t […]

Categories: End of Times, Games, Memory, Urban, Zombie • Tags: deja vu, Fallout 3, Gary Indiana, post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, rust belt, Super-Duper Mart

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