Mankind Takes a Fall in New Museum Displays
Skywise
New York Times
May 12, 2001
Mankind Takes a Fall in New Museum Displays
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In one of his more fantastical moments, the novelist Jorge Luis Borges
imagined an ancient Chinese encyclopedia that presented a method for
ordering all the world's animals. Any creature, instead of belonging to
groups like "insects" or "amphibians," could be classified in one of these
categories: 1) belonging to the emperor, 2) embalmed, 3) tame, 4) suckling
pigs, 5) sirens, 6) fabulous, 7) stray dogs, 8) included in the present
classification, 9) frenzied, 10) innumerable, 11) drawn with a very fine
camel-hair brush, 12) et cetera, 13) having just broken the water pitcher
and 14) that from a long way off look like flies. These categories, of
course, disrupt the very idea of taxonomy. But the list, which is cited by
the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his book "The Order of Things,"
forces us to question how we create categories in the first place.
How do we organize the natural world? Do we create a narrative account,
giving each animal a proper place, as in the biblical story of creation? Is
there a hierarchy in our orderings, in which we judge animals by their
usefulness to us or by their place in an evolutionary ladder? What place
does humanity have in the natural order?
These are the kinds of questions that every natural history museum must ask
as it organizes its stuffed animals and preserved bugs and anthropological
artifacts into different rooms, guiding visitors through a series of
spectacles. Does a flamingo belong in the same room as a goose or a pelican?
It depends on the theory of classification. One philosopher has suggested
that the challenge is a bit like deciding whether in a supermarket canned
peaches should be stacked next to fresh peaches or with other canned goods.
Such questions of category have also become more urgent in recent years as
the 19th-century model of the natural history museum, combining serious
science and sober curatorial display, is being challenged. Just a few weeks
ago, for example, the director of the Smithsonian Institution, Lawrence M.
Small, proposed closing a conservation and research center associated with
the National Zoological Park; he backed off when critics at the National
Museum of Natural History accused him of slighting scientific research at
the Smithsonian.
Issues affecting the direction of such museums also lie beneath the surface
of a new book, "Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution
of Natural History Museums" (Oxford University Press) by Stephen T. Asma, a
philosopher at Columbia College in Chicago. He is a bit like the explorers
of a century ago who filled museums with exotica from around the world <
ornate shells, mutant chickens, scores of beetles. In London, Paris, New
York and Chicago, he finds grizzly lessons in taxidermy and dissection and
preservation, gruesome images of deformed fetuses and excised tumors,
elaborate theories of evolution, and philosophical debates about the status
of biological knowledge. Along the way there are also discussions of the new
ideologies shaping the contemporary natural history museum.
Similar changes are, of course, familiar from art museums, which have over
the last few decades been transformed under the pressures of politics and
popular culture, leaving neither the art, nor the building housing it,
unaltered. Now, books about the natural history museum have also been
appearing, many invoking the challenges to categories and classifications
raised by Foucault. The books bear titles like "Museums and the Shaping of
Knowledge" (by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill), "Nature's Museums" (by Carla Yanni)
and "Possessing Nature" (by Paula Findlen).
The natural history museum, in most of these accounts, is said to have
evolved out of 16th- and 17th-century "curiosity cabinets." Ms. Findlen, a
historian at Stanford University, suggests that knowledge, which had
formerly been acquired from books, began to be created "by a community of
collectors, experimenters and visitors." They selected rare objects from the
natural world and proudly displayed them.
One of the most famous cabinets belonged to an apothecary in 16th-century
Naples who completely covered the walls and ceiling of his room with
seashells, a dissected lizard, a starfish, an armadillo, a bird and various
other preserved creatures. Such cabinets displayed a world that was almost
overwhelmingly disordered and miscellaneous. On the other hand, the
collector also created order out of chaos, simply by acts of ownership and
display; his will and taste was placed at the center of the natural world.
Late in the 18th century, two important figures, John Hunter in London and
Baron Georges Cuvier in Paris, began their own natural history collections,
much of which remain intact to this day. Their goal was not to illustrate
the curiosity cabinet's miscellaneous abundance, but to find, in that
abundance, a rational order. Hunter, for example, classified animal parts
according to the functions they served. One cabinet displays "Parts Employed
in Motion" and brings together everything from various animal joints to tree
sap to strands of muscle. Function defines order.
Cuvier, on the other hand, believed that there were more important
categories. Mr. Asma, who visited his collection at the Galerie d'Anatomie
Comparée in Paris, notes that while some of Cuvier's cabinets contain
objects serving the same function (like olfactory organs), the cabinets are
also organized by "branches" of animal life, separating the organs of
mammals or fish or reptiles. Cuvier believed that such larger orders were
fundamental and unchanging.
There were hints, in these ideas of an unchanging natural order, of a nearly
divine structuring of the world. Ms. Yanni, who teaches art history at
Rutgers, shows that variations on this idea governed the design of museums
for nearly a century. In 1853, for example, an advocate for a new natural
history museum at Oxford University argued that each specimen in the museum
should occupy "precisely the same relative place that it did in God's own
Museum, the Physical Universe in which it lived and moved and had its
being." There were other goals as well: a founder of the Museum of Natural
History in London suggested that its scope and seriousness should be
"commensurate with the greatness of the nation."
The solemnity and grandeur of these intentions meant that even then, there
were worries over possible distortion and levity. One architect wrote in
1864 that if the London museum was too grand, specimens would "lose scale
and importance" and the display would sink "from the character of science to
that of show." But as one British critic of the time noted, "it has remained
for our American cousins to drag the term museum down to a very low level."
One of the great American collections, housed in Philadelphia, was
eventually sold to P. T. Barnum.
But gradually, all museums do become a bit less religiously grandiose. By
the late 19th century, the divine model had been replaced by the Darwinian
model, requiring a complete reorganization of the museum. Evolutionary
thinking, which is now becoming even more sophisticated, has led to another
series of revisions. Mr. Asma shows, for example, that at the American
Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the Hall of Vertebrate Origins,
which opened in 1996, is strictly organized on a "cladistic" principle of
taxonomy: animals are grouped not by shared surface characteristics and
functions, but by shared ancestors. The hall is a demonstration of evolution
and historical change. The museum's literature makes it clear that this
ordering is not immutable but is itself "subject to change and refinement."
During the last decade or so, other principles of organization are being
developed in which animals are categorized not by their evolutionary
relationships, but by their connections with other creatures in an
ecological habitat; each species is part of a web of connections. The
current key concept, which may be dominant for the next generation, is
"biodiversity," in which homo sapiens becomes just another species in a
daunting assemblage of life forms. Humanity, seen in such a context, can
even be treated as a threat to the "natural" order. The Grande Galerie de
l'Évolution in Paris, for example, is, as Mr. Asma describes, a "heavily
moralized tour through the human destruction of nature," even including a
sardonic exhibit of human garbage. This "self-loathing," Mr. Asma says, is
"the single greatest constant" in contemporary natural history museums.
So whether the museum ecologically condemns the human or places it in an
unprivileged biological position, something is changing from the era when
natural history museums paid homage to the human mind as it organized the
world from its superior evolutionary perch. It is a bit like what happens in
the new Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural
History: the old anthropocentric planetarium is replaced by a series of
exhibitions that shrink the human into insignificance when compared to the
universe's expanse of space and time.
Judging from some of the descriptions in recent books, the new natural
history museum has tended to become less a temple celebrating human mastery
than a spectacle that humans must gaze at as insignificant interlopers. Is
it possible that this has encouraged the new emphasis on "edutainment," with
the proliferation of gift shops and cafeterias and interactive exhibits?
These provide the only habitats where a visitor can feel any power or
self-importance in a museum-universe stripped of divinity and
anthropocentricity. At best, the outcome is humility; at worst, it is self-
loathing. We have returned, in a sense, to those old curiosity cabinets,
except we are one of the species mounted on the wall, cantankerous mites in
the midst of overwhelming diversity, objects of self-dissection and
skeptical scrutiny.