Posts filed under 'Destinations'
Photo by Eugene Richards
From “North Dakota, The Emptied Prairie”
National Geographic Magazine
These photos bear an eerie, graceful, painful resemblance to the country where I grew up.
The year I finished high school, my parents left “town” (7,000 people) for twenty acres outside a decaying farming village of 50 people (more or less). Over time, the village lost its school, its church, its general store, and its gas station; the only amenities left behind in 1994 were a post office and a cafe.
I always thought it was a terribly sad place. It lies on a high plateau, with little to break the weather. In the winter, snowdrifts render the whole country featureless and disorienting. In the summer, wind ripples incessantly across the empty fields, pries wide the gaping sideboards of empty houses, erodes gentle mounds that one only recognizes as former farmsteads because they’re covered with tenacious yellow roses.
Supposedly, an entire neighboring community has completely vanished in this way, plowed under wheat and shrouded in roses. In the early morning, coming home from the night shift at the vegetable packing plant, I used to take random dirt roads through the farmland, looking for this ghost town. I never found it, but then I’m not sure I would have known if I did.
Photo by Eugene Richards
via
January 21st, 2008
Greenhouse, Chelsea Physic Garden
As I file away the debris of the last year, I realize that I never finished posting about my week in London this summer. It was exhausting, but by no means exhaustive. I feel foolish that I didn’t plan ahead! But I did hit the major highlights: on Sunday I saw the Chelsea Physic Garden with Neurophilosphy’s Moheb. On Tuesday I visited the shiny new Wellcome Collection, right around the corner from University College London. Thursday was Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum. On Friday I dropped by the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses both the Hunterian Museum and the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. (Wellcome’s name is all over the place, because it’s the UK’s largest independent charitable trust funding medical research. I can’t quite determine if they’re richer than HHMI. . . isn’t that the non-profit equivalent of “richer than Croesus”?) I’ve already posted about the Hunterian Museum & Wellcome Museum. Today I want to add some notes about a few other destinations.
Wellcome Collection
The Wellcome collection has thee exhibit galleries - a changing exhibition downstairs, and two upstairs galleries which feature artifacts from Wellcome’s personal collection and contemporary science-influenced art. The current exhibition is “Sleeping and Dreaming,” but during my visit it was “The Heart,” interleaving medical illustrations and models of great historical significance (art/texts by da Vinci, Harvey, and Galen; varnished wood anatomical tables; a wax model of a dissected, Venus-like torso; etc.) with popular portrayals of the heart as seat of love & soul. Here’s the exhibition summary:
The heart, widely understood as the place where life begins and ends, has always featured as a potent symbol in our religions, myths and rituals. Modern medical science has taught us that much of the power and influence traditionally attributed to the heart actually lies in the brain. Nevertheless we remain reluctant to let go of the notion - deeply rooted in everyday language and imagery - that the heart is the home of our emotions and of our true character.
This exhibition looked at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means. Concentrating primarily on Western medicine and culture, it brought together objects and images from the histories of both science and art, as well as from everyday life.
It followed the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considered its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance. Why is it that the pump that circulates our blood is so intimately bound up with the way we discuss our emotional and moral lives, and so central to the question of the relationship between body and soul?
It’s an interesting question, and the answer is by no means obvious. Now that everyone knows the brain is where “love” resides, why do we still return to the heart as the symbol of deep emotion? The brain isn’t very romantic in appearance, but neither is the heart - it’s actually quite a gruesome and unattractive organ, wrapped in a nasty tough membranous sac and swaddled in fat (it’s really horrifying how much fat is packed around the hearts of even individuals of normal weight). The exhibit successfully explored that contradiction, without ever getting too esoteric. While you can no longer see it in person, and unfortunately photography was not allowed, you can view selected images on line here.
Other feature of the Wellcome collection included a selection of biomedicine-inspired art, including giant wax insect models (vectors that transmit malaria), glass models of viroids, and provocative pieces like John Isaacs’ “I can’t help the way I feel” (below). These were intermixed with the educational - a bound set of volumes representing the human genome, interactive computer games - and, in the next room over, the voyeuristically bizarre - chastity belts, vintage fetishes, and prosthetic limbs from Sir Henry Wellcome’s personal collection. Something for everyone!
Wax models of malaria vectors
Wellcome Collection
I can’t help the way I feel (2003)
John Isaacs
“In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. The body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.” - John Isaacs
HIV Virus Sculpture (2004)
Luke Jerram
“This sculpture was created in response to the constant bombardment by coloured images we receive through the media. Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial coloring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like.” - Luke Jerram
Additional destinations
Unfortunately, squeezing even half of London’s museums into a week-long visit is impossible. And if you’re a devotee of biological specimens and medical history, the places you’d like to see are probably not in your guidebook, because most people think they’re “icky.” So here are a few insights I gained on my trip and would like to share.
First, be aware that many museums are closed Mondays. Most are open only between 10 and 5; you might want to eschew lunch to maximize your viewing time, or eat on the run. The Tube goes almost everywhere you’ll need, so buy an Oyster card; a week’s pass for zones 1-2, which can be coded onto your Oyster card, is probably a good idea as well. But the Tube is slow, especially on weekends, so plan ahead - you don’t want to waste an hour of that precious 10-5 window in transit from Holborn to Chelsea!
Natural History Museum, London
The British Museum: Mummies, Lindow Man. Be prepared: the Egyptian exhibits are noisy and busy, especially on the weekend. Lindow man, on the other hand, is totally neglected, probably because he looks like a dried up omelet. When you become homicidal towards tour groups, seek him out in the corner of room 50.
Lindow Man: not terribly photogenic, is he?
British Library “Treasures” (Ritblat Gallery) - Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, letter from Darwin to Wallace, various herbal and medical manuscripts. Alas, no photography allowed - but go to the website, they have some lovely images there.
University College London: Pure randomness, in that collegiate what-shall-we-stick-in-our-glass-cabinets? sense. But it’s right around the corner from the Wellcome Galleries, so why not pay your respects to the Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham (his skeleton, dressed in his clothes, with a wax head, sitting in what appears to be an antique telephone booth). So wierd.
The Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham, with wax head
Stuffed taxidermic primate, likely quite evil, UCL
The Chelsea Physic Garden: Second-oldest apothecaries’ garden in England (oldest is at Oxford). Snag a tour guide for the best experience, since the map and labels don’t do much good. Then seek out the small glass cases of medical oddities in the back of the gift shop. The garden is only open in the afternoon, on certain days, so you’ll have to plan around it, but it’s extraordinarily peaceful (especially after the British Museum). And the walk through Chelsea is lovely.
Vintage drug paraphernalia? Chelsea Physic Garden
The Wellcome Library (same location as the Wellcome collection, but slightly different hours): You need to come prepared, knowing what you want to view. Research in advance! I didn’t! Damn!
January 13th, 2008
Is there some sort of typological standard for disembodied medical hands? I took this picture in London, and thought nothing of it at the time - but it does strongly resemble the hands in Nicole Natri’s collage, and the descriptions of hands at the Spitzner museum. Hmmm. . . .
December 18th, 2007
If you didn’t get enough skulls last night, here’s an interesting art show via Simplistic Art.
Lustmord Table
Jenny Holzer, 1994
And some Embroidered skeletons by Angelo Filomeno, via Ullabenulla:
The Grand Circus: Death of Presumptuous Philosopher
Embroidery on silk shantung
Angelo Filomeno, 2005
And the granddaddy of skeleton art is of course Sedlec Ossuary, Czechoslovakia.
A few pictures from The Flying Kiwi via Ullabenulla:
And a beautiful, intimate photostream of Sedlec from Curious Expeditions:
Bone chalice
Curious Expeditions
November 1st, 2007
Barn
photo by Corinne May Botz
“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this.” - John Waters
Fans of CSI will be familiar with the “miniature killer” story arc, in which Grissom & company are taunted by a serial killer (with, apparently, a LOT of free time) who builds dollhouse-like crime scenes.
CSI’s writers might have gotten the idea from Frances Glessner Lee, a socialite and forensic science amateur who built similar mini-murder rooms. Called the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” these nineteen dioramas were used as teaching tools at the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine and now reside at Baltimore in the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office.
Several of the dioramas, including a barn (above), kitchen, and woodshed, are on display at the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Proofs exhibition (through February 2008).
Photographer Corinne May Botz documented Lee’s dioramas in a 1994 book. The SF Chronicle review is really excellent, and contains this charming description of Lee’s work:
Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress, provided for just about every creature comfort when she fashioned 19 dollhouse rooms during the 1940s. She stocked the larders with canned goods and placed half-peeled potatoes by the kitchen sink. Over a crib, she pasted pink striped wallpaper.
But you might not want your dolls to live there.
Miniature corpses — bitten, hanged, shot, stabbed and poisoned — are slumped everywhere. The furnishings show signs of struggles and dissolute lives; liquor bottles and chairs have been overturned; ashtrays overflow.
Lee, a volunteer police officer with an honorary captain’s rank whose father was a founder of the International Harvester Co., used her ghoulish scenes to teach police recruits the art of observation.
She called her miniatures the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a saying she had heard from detectives: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.” At her thousand-acre estate in Bethlehem, N.H., she set up a workshop called the Nutshell Laboratories. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. After endowing a new department in legal medicine at Harvard, she created the Nutshells as classroom tools, packing them with tiny but detectable clues: lipstick smears on a pillowcase, a bullet embedded in a wall.
“The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall,” she suggested in her curriculum notes. (source)
Three-Room Dwelling
Photo by Corinne May Botz
More: A 1953 Popular Mechanics article on Lee’s work (via Modern Mechanix, who noted this “origin of CSI” prior to the obvious miniature killer influence)
a sweetly enthusiastic 1949 news article about her
A critical article by Jennifer Doublet
October 20th, 2007
Bibliophiles: bookmark this link! Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries.
One of my favorite blogs, Curious Expeditions, has written what may be the definitive blog post for library lovers. I’ve only been to four of the libraries on the list, but I was at one of them just today, so it was a timely post.
There are definitely more beautiful libraries in Europe, but I’m excited to pop over to Georgetown and see the deliciously steampunky Captain Nemo Riggs Library. Can’t wait for a giant squid to swim past those portholes.
I posted previously on the Real Gabinete.
More good library stuff and links here.
September 10th, 2007
Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions
Hunterian museum
One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible.
The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended skeletons:
Illustrated London News, 1845
The Hunterian Gallery before the wars (source)
So I was shocked when I entered the grey, columned Royal College, climbed a graciously curving stairway, and found this extremely modern, two-story crystal-and-glass atrium:
The Crystal Gallery at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
Definitely not what I was expecting! But it grew on me. I love ornate curiosity cabinets, but there is something very elegant about unadorned bones, and simple glass jars. Biological structures are so rich with intrinsic beauty, there’s no real need to gild the lily (that means you, Damien Hirst).
Though the new Hunterian galleries are peaceful and refined, I felt a slight pang of regret for the railings and wood cabinetry Darwin would have touched, when he studied here in the 1830s and 40s. Unfortunately, many of the specimens Darwin saw were destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was bombed in 1941. Like the gallery housing it, John Hunter’s collection is no longer what it once was. But what remains is still pretty darn amazing.
Hunter, a renowned surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society, worked tirelessly to collect medical anomalies like the 7′7″ skeleton of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne (for which Hunter paid 130 pounds). He also amassed thousands of less exotic teaching specimens: though he did not have access to formaldehyde, he took wet preservation in alcohol to its highest level. After Hunter’s death in 1793, his ~13,000 specimens were purchased by the British state. The collection would be maintained (and enlarged) by the Royal College of Surgeons for the next two hundred years.
Hunter’s collection is organized according to some rather unusual curatorial precepts. As a physician and early experimentalist, Hunter was less interested in taxonomy than in physiology. He grouped specimens not by family or type, but as exemplars of processes - mouthparts and digestion, reproduction, etc. From the Victorian perspective,
The design of Mr. Hunter, in making this collection, was to exhibit the gradations of nature, from the most simple state in which life is found to exist, up to the most perfect and most complex of the animal creation, man himself. By his art, he was able to expose and preserve in a dried state, or in spirits, the corresponding parts of animal bodies; so that the various links in the chain of a perfect being may be readily followed and clearly understood. (Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights, 1844)
But Hunter’s collection does not exemplify linear progression, so much as ramification: the incredible diversity of ways that animal forms have evolved to accomplish given functions. Most of the specimens displayed here are not human; the Hunterian is a shrine not to Man, but to our entire extended family.
I first heard of the Hunterian through the delightful book Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture of Natural History Museums
, by Stephen Asma at Columbia College, Chicago. (I highly recommend this book, if you don’t own it already). Asma’s first impression of the Hunterian was similar to my own:
Without a grasp of Hunter’s underlying principles, the cases seemed slightly irrational. In one case, marked “Digestion,” I found various dissections of mammals, parasitic worms, a cicada, a locust, slugs, a squid, a vulture, a woodpecker, and a puffin. This hodgepodge arrangement follows no taxonomic grouping. . . Individual species, genera, and even families are displayed together to illustrate the unique ways that their structures fit the functions of digestion, circulation, respiration, and so forth. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 63)
My copy of Pickled Heads has been with in storage with the rest of my belongings for months, so I’d forgotten Asma’s words. But when I walked up to the first case of Hunter’s jars (mouthparts of squid, beaks, teeth, mouthparts of bees and cicadas), I immediately remembered Asma’s description, and recognized what he meant. The intestines of fish were right next to the stomachs of mammals, including a rat which substantially outweighed the tiny human fetus next to it. There is no mistaking the idiosyncratic style of this little museum, so different from the aggressively educational dioramas of the London Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Modern biology museums are full-color, multimedia entertainment factories - it’s a way to engage the audience, true, but it sometimes teeters toward the tawdry and didactic. Asma expresses the difference far better than I could:
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Hunterian Museum–besides the bleached and bloated “monsters”–is that it’s not intended for a lay audience. The Hunterian doesn’t really care whether the average person is “getting it.” This is unexpectedly unnerving, since most other museum encounters come complete with torrents of helpful information. Almost every museum specimen that you have ever encountered, be it a fossil, a jar, or a mount, is accompanied by a plaque, a chart, or a recording that announces to you–even before a question has been formulated in your head-”what you are seeing is so and so. . . .”
What was Hunter trying to communicate when he grouped his specimens? This question alone gives one a more interactive relationship with the museum than any computer gadgetry could. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 78-79)
It’s a little unfair to say the Hunterian doesn’t care if visitors “get it.” I saw a class of kids around twelve years old when I was there, moving in and out of a room set aside for teaching purposes, and they seemed to be “getting it” pretty well. The point is, they were being allowed to draw their own conclusions, and with a little guidance, to simply wander and wonder. Refreshing indeed.
What do I do when confronted with a mute collection of natural wonders? Why, break out the sketchbook. But I didn’t have one! It’s been so long since I felt peaceful enough to sketch in a museum - I’m normally buffeted by thousands of obnoxious children, and worse, tourists who act like children. I wasn’t prepared. I had to buy a little 5″x8″ Moleskine at a nearby bookshop, and sketch with a mechanical pencil while sitting on the floor. Since the museum does not allow photography, not even for earnest, sincere bloggers, these little doodles are all I have to represent Hunter’s myriad curiosities. I can’t believe I didn’t even get to the bound foot, or the lion with rickets, or the male and female ivory anatomical models. Argh.
Sepia officinalis (preparation showing the mouthparts of a cuttlefish)
Hunterian Museum
If you are active in the biomedical professions (and yes, they will ask for proof of this, like an ID card) you may also visit the Wellcome Anatomy and Pathology Museum upstairs.
At first glance, the Wellcome collection seems like the neglected younger sibling of the Hunterian prodigal son (or, if you prefer, the Harry-under-the-stairs to the spoiled Hunterian Dudley Dursley). It’s one outdated, drab room, filled with hundreds of specimen jars. No sexy lighting or pedagogical dioramas here - to figure out what you’re viewing you have to thumb through well-used, slightly sticky binders of notes. These binders are tucked in shelves or tables, wherever the last user left them; I couldn’t find one of the binders at all, so I’m still in the dark about some of the skeletal abnormalities I saw.
But the biggest difference is that the Wellcome specimens are all Homo sapiens, representing a variety of obscure, rare, or dramatic medical conditions - conditions, like keratin horns, that I never expected to personally see in the flesh! And they’re generally in better condition than the Hunterian specimens (most date from the 20th century). I could have spent five to ten minutes examining a single specimen, and there are hundreds of prosections in the Museum. I was completely overwhelmed, and didn’t sketch a single thing (sorry).
I wondered why the Hunterian and Wellcome collections were spatially isolated in this way, and the Wellcome closed to the public. It couldn’t be about shock value - some of the Hunterian exhibits were pretty gruesome. So I asked the head of conservation, who told me that it has to do with the legal status of the collection.
The UK has a long history of scandalous “body-snatching” (see this Curious Expeditions post for more on that nefarious activity). Since the 1832 Anatomy Act, enacted to discourage the illicit sale of body parts, specimens like those in the Wellcome collection have been more and more tightly restricted. Since 2006, the Human Tissues Authority has regulated the donation, disposal, and use of medical specimens and cadavers, and requires special licesning for the public display of remains from persons who died since 1906 (according to their FAQ, they also require licenses of plastination exhibits, such as Body Worlds). But since John Hunter lived, collected, and died years before the Anatomy Act, his collection can be displayed without the restrictions that impact the pathology collection.
Skull of 25-year-old man showing enlargement due to hydrocephalus
Liston collection at Hunterian Museum
I highly recommend both the Hunterian and Wellcome collections to any biologist, artist, kunstkammer fan, or interested layperson visiting London. The Hunterian is perfectly suitable for older children, and surprisingly peaceful for a (free!) museum so close to both the British Library and Inns of Court. There were tourists everywhere, but only a handful stopping by to see John Hunter’s life’s work. You might make a day of it and also visit the Wellcome Collection, around the corner near UCL, or Sir John Soanes Museum, which is literally across the street - but then, I still need to post about those, don’t I?
So much to see, so much to blog, so little time. What a wonderful world.
September 9th, 2007
This is a good idea, but in practice it isn’t terribly accurate. The idea is to tell you whether the area in which you live is walker-friendly – how many stores, restaurants, bars, etc. are close to you? Unfortunately, Google’s database, the basis of the Walkscore algorithm, seems deficient. I live amidst a veritable explosion of eateries here in DC - plus, I’m within easy walking distance of the National Zoo. Lions and tigers! Pandas and elephants! A flippin’ baby giant anteater! That’s gotta be a triple walk score right there. Yet my score is only 82/100 - a B. Why?
So then I looked at the sleepy town where I used to live. My old house had a score of 60. WHAT? There was nothing to do there! That’s why I left!
A quick check of the destinations listed explained it all. I used to live very close to, yet inexplicably did not visit, the Young Marines, Municipal Building Maintenance, Municipal Park Maintenance, the Department of Fisheries, several long-defunct libraries and cafes, a catering establishment, and eight schools. And then there’s the slight problem of the RIVER between my house and half the proposed destinations. It’s hard to carry groceries while snorkeling. (These are all known issues with Walkscore.)
No algorithm is perfect, but Walkscore will not tell you if you live in a “good” neighborhood. Only visiting can tell you that. And I’m going to go visit the giant baby anteater.
August 21st, 2007
I just finished driving from Seattle to Washington, DC, which explains my neglect of the blog. I’ve been more concerned with straightening out last-minute snafus via cell phone, than with posting here. And sadly, I was traveling alone, so I couldn’t spare the time to pull over at each tempting vista and take photos, and I have no pictures.
Before Monday, I had never driven past Idaho. So as I left on my journey, I was naively hoping to “see the country” in some sort of enlightening, trans-generational, road-trip-through-Americana way. That didn’t happen. Cruising I-90 might allow one to view the panoramic vistas of the West, but those vistas look pretty identical until Minnesota. And in the Midwest, the tollways become downright boring. I could hardly see anything, even in Chicago. Chicago was two horrific hours of my life that I will never have back, for which I paid some $13 in tolls. Gah.
Certain trends were apparent: there is a strong linear relationship between progress eastward and the square footage of Wal-Marts. Meanwhile, any relationship between posted speed limit and actual speed collapses. People drove about 75-80 mph the entire way, but in Montana the speed limit was a realistic 75; from Illinois it was frequently 55. Call me provincial, but it was odd going 30 mph over the speed limit. Not to mention paying tolls every 30 miles or so.
In the West, driving is mostly toll-free. And it’s an entertaining experience, complete with gratuitous roadside attractions and bizarre signage. Idaho’s highway department wedges enthusiastic adjectives in everywhere: “Now Leaving Wild and Scenic Lochsa River.” Montana has a creative, rather touching collection of homemade anti-meth warnings. Roadside signage reaches its apogee in South Dakota, where there are literally hundreds of billboards advertising a rural Disneyland-cum-curiosity-cabinet called Wall Drug. I did not stop at Wall Drug, although it was mighty tempting; they promised 5-cent coffee (free to vets and honeymooners), a shooting gallery, and a 40-foot tall dinosaur! If I’d known how desolate the highways would be for the rest of my trip, I would not have passed up the Wall Drug experience.
Overall, the thing I noticed most was the physical change in the landscape. It got softer and lusher and progressively more claustrophobic, as the humid vegetation and remarkably low clouds closed in around the road. I have never seen so many deciduous trees in my life - rolling mounds of them, like green cotton candy. Lovely at first, sure, but then unsettling. By the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I had goosebumps, recalling the sinister vegetation of Lovecraft and Hawthorne. I have no fear whatsoever of forests at home - I’ve been camping in pitch dark and feeling my way tent-to-tent trunk-by-trunk since I was seven years old. But the trees in Pennsylvania were creepy. They felt off. Their shapes seemed feverishly primordial, in a way the much older conifers of the West do not. Which makes no phylogenetic sense at all.
Obviously the trees of Pennsylvania weren’t out to get me. So why did I feel as if they were? Was it too much Mountain Dew? Too little sleep? Or does our local version of “Nature” imprint itself upon us so strongly that foreign vegetation seems a little bit unnatural? I once took a road trip with a Wisconsin native who absolutely refused to leave the car in a patch of scrubby, burned-over Idaho wilderness. I thought he was a wuss, but who knows? Maybe he was tapping into some visceral, biological aversion to the unknown.
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll become a resident of Washington, DC, and will most likely be on the East coast for the next several years - plenty of time to adjust to crazy Lovecraftian trees. In the next few days I’ll resume the account of my trip to London. I have good stuff to share, but just haven’t had the time to write and upload photos. More to come - as soon as I’m moved in and have internet access, that is. . .
August 16th, 2007
Every biologist secretly craves seafood counters labeled “Crustacea” in beautiful art deco lettering. Thank you, Harrods.
August 7th, 2007
Portobello Road, London
This is not what I usually envision when I think of “Chelsea galleries.” But to be fair, their Chelsea did come first.
August 6th, 2007
The Lady of Shalott, 1888
John William Waterhouse
I arrived at the Tate Britain (better known by its former name, the Tate Gallery) Monday morning, only to discover that their entire inventory of pre-Raphaelites had been removed from display a few hours before.
I nearly had an American temper tantrum on the spot. Adoration of the pre-Raphaelite collection (including Millais’ Ophelia, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, etc.) was my entire reason for visiting. I could have easily gone to the Tate last week had I known of the impending change. There was no warning on their website, and the museum’s rep admitted it wasn’t planned until next week. My travel karma is seriously awry!
Luckily, the excursion was salvaged. I saw one Rossetti, his late work Proserpine, and four paintings by Burne-Jones and Waterhouse, who are usually shoehorned in with Rossetti and Millais but in this case were in the next (not emptied) room over. Very lucky for me indeed, since Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott may be my favorite. painting. ever.
I know the last decade’s surfeit of pre-Raphaelite nostalgia has made everyone heartily sick of large-eyed, anguished damsels. But this painting has been part of my psyche for over twenty years, just as long as The Lord of the Rings. As with LOTR, no amount of popular abuse can diminish my affection for it.
Background on the Lady of Shalott/Elaine of Astolat
Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott” (text and more and more)
Waterhouse depicted this story three times. This painting is his earliest, and I think, the best, although I also love his 1894 version. I prefer Waterhouse’s versions over those of his contemporaries because all three are portraits - his Lady has a personality. She’s the legendary victim of unrequited love, of course, but she’s not passive. She chooses her own destiny (or is willfully self-destructive) when she chooses to look out the window at Lancelot. She’s haunted. She’s despairing. She’s angry. She represents the tension between the cloistered, unreal sphere of art (”I am half-sick of shadows”) and the passionate sphere of the body. And of course, fueling infinite feminist analyses, she represents how women have historically been punished for violating social constraints and embracing their independence or sexuality:
Nevertheless, it is hard to read his, or the other, images as anything but an oblique account of the confined and restricted world of the Victorian woman–accursed and prohibited by virtue of her sex alone–and the dire consequences attendant on rebellion. The rejection of seclusion in the shadowy sphere of prescribed femininity, where the approved activity is weaving or embroidery, leads immediately to ostracism and social death. The enclosed rooms in which these ladies live, looking out on inviting sunlit landscapes, and the tangled threads binding their vigorous limbs, are surely metaphors of woman’s condition, signifying the docile, passive, reflective and domestic role that dominated Victorian ideas of femininity. The lady cannot break from her constraints: her gesture of independence provokes the curse. It is interesting that most artists chose to depict this particular moment, so that their ladies are frozen forever in their decision of defiance (Jan Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women, 1987).
At the Tate, I saw few details that my close (ok, obsessive) examination of this painting in books and posters hadn’t already revealed. But one pleasant surprise was that most of the painting, aside from the face, is almost impressionistic, thick with buttery smudges of paint. The tapestry draped from the boat is especially rough, almost coarse.
To me, the strength of the brushstrokes seemed better suited to the magnitude of the themes involved than the pretty, polished impression one gets from a reproduction. Millions of dorm room posters notwithstanding (and despite Lancelot’s insipid comment “she has a lovely face,”) this is not a pretty painting at all - it’s downright frightening. If you get what I mean by that, then you probably like the painting as much as I do.
July 31st, 2007
Today I visited Darwin and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. Newton was there too, but he was being all standoffish behind an iron railing (possibly to deter enthusiastic fans of The Da Vinci Code, but more likely for some liturgical reason).
Quick: what’s Charles Darwin’s middle name? That’s ok - I didn’t know either. (It’s Charles Robert Darwin).
For the record, the weather in London was lovely today. Tomorrow, though, probably not so much. But I’ll be in the British Museum, so it won’t matter. (happy noise)
P.S. At least a quarter of the people on the plane over here were reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In my side row, all three of us were reading it! Unfortunately the flight was much, much longer than the book.
July 27th, 2007
a girl
whose hair is yellower than
torchlight should wear no
headdress but fresh flowers
-Sappho (translated by Mary Barnard)
I’ll be traveling for the next three weeks, so posts will be sparse. But I’ll be on the lookout for things to share - like this counterpoint of art and nature, from a visit to Lakewold Gardens, about an hour south of Seattle.
Enjoy the sunshine, wherever you are.
July 10th, 2007
Last weekend I discovered Seattle’s Gas Works Park. By accident. And ended up on a tour through the derelict gasworks - led by the park’s designer, Richard Haag. The structures are fenced off, so I got the impression this was an unusual privilege. Fortunately my camera’s battery wasn’t completely exhausted, though I was torn between taking photos and listening to Haag recount his efforts several decades ago to convince the city that the industrial site could be bioremediated. Among his persuasive arguments: growing a nice crop of tomatoes in what was thought to be dead soil.
A former refinery that converted oil and coal to gas, the plant became obsolete in the 1950s, leaving the ground beneath saturated with tar and aromatic hydrocarbons. It was one of the first toxic industrial sites to be successfully reclaimed for public use through bioremediation (although it is still monitored, and intermittent cleanup efforts continue).
My first reaction was WTF?!? How could I know nothing about this extraordinary place? I am so impressed with the city of Seattle (and Haag) for maintaining the towers in their rusty steampunk glory, instead of leveling them, as the original plans for the site demanded. Out of 1400 such gasification plants once operating across the US, this is the largest remnant left standing.
From the park outside, the gasworks now resemble a gigantic modern sculpture with a fashionably distressed patina. The unreal blue-green of the Seattle grass contrasts so strongly with the red rust that it stings the eyes. But in among the towers, the scene is ghostly. Blackberries twine lushly through the iron girders, obviously undaunted by any lingering contamination in the soil. Small piles of bleached bones, perhaps from rodents or birds, litter the ruins. Only a few dangling loops of slender T1 cable, probably from a security system, betray that the Internet Age has supplanted the Industrial.
Although the refinery is barely over 100 years old (and despite its rivets and cogs, not properly “steampunk” at all), rain and benign neglect have left it seemingly ancient, like a half-exposed fossil. I hope these images capture its aura of timeless decay.
June 18th, 2007
Previous Posts