Jim Bissland, Mind Your Head
Science tells us that the average brain fires its synapses several million times every hour. David Fairbanks Ford's brain probably fires its neural popguns at least four or five times as often, producing intracranial light shows to rival the aurora borealis or, at the very least, a Chinese salute to the Year of the Goat. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Ford's brain is, well, different.
Ford is the founder, president, curator, conservator, interpreter, fundraiser, business manager, publicist, maker of display cases, and floor sweeper for the Main Street Museum, a cabinet of curiosities that could have been designed by P. T. Barnum if only he had been really creative. At last sighting, the MSM (as the cognoscenti call it) was more or less in Hartford, Vermont, but when and where fortune will take it next, God only knows, although Ford is hoping for another storefront in White River Junction. You won't find the MSM in the usual guidebooks, but in Vermont, at least, it has developed a certain reputation and even attracted some funding from the Vermont Arts Council and a few other daring sources. Ford happily admits that the MSM has been called "Vermont's Strangest Museum" and that he himself is often referred to as "quirky". However, he prefers to call the MSM "Vermont's most amiable museum."
Most of the MSM's collection is housed in an ancient back-road warehouse which also shelters Ford and three artist friends in genteel shabbiness. Some of MSM items are a mile away in a White River Junction café's corridor (which Ford has dubbed the Hall of Industrial Antiquities) and more can be seen on the World Wide Web at a handsome site that also features a virtual restroom. The warehouse collection is best of all of course, but he warehouse is unmarked and can take some effort to find. For those who persist by making an appointment and getting directions, these are some of the rewards.
- Elvis Presley's gallstones (allegedly), floating in bleach in a glass canning jar and resembling fuzzy white squid.
- Pickled eggs in tar, a demonstration of preservation techniques that can result in sulfurous fumes.
- A small bottle that contained salve used to treat the horrific injuries of Phineas Gage (q.v.)
- A glass canning jar filled with shredded paper ("A translation of concept to physicality")
- The Virgisaurus: a Madonna figure with a dinosaur head. (If you find this more shocking than thought-provoking, it's probably time to leave. However, you'll miss the Miraculous Picture of the Virgin Mary, miraculous "because it survived the Flood of 1927.")
- Mink in a jar. Go figure.
- Twin bottles of almost identical blue fluid: one, wild-berry drink; the other, windshield washer fluid. This may be a commentary on the chemical concoctions of the American food industry. Or something.
- Slides of brains from a mental hospital and a piece of brain coral, apparently an illustration of comparative morphology.
- A softball fro a Dallas thrift shop, a substitute for the cannonball with the MSM collection lacks.
- Dried plants (and weeds) collected on a local woman's world tour in 1886; Napoleon's tomb, Shakespeare's house, and Henry VIII's Hampton Court are among sites represented.
- The Connecticut River Sea-Monster, a collection of bones fished from the river just below White River Junction's wastewater treatment plant and assembled with wax and fishing line into an eight-foot, five-inch specimen. (Biologists from Dartmouth College have studied this. I asked Ford what their professional opinion had been. With a face as innocent as a nun in a wimple, he told me, "They said that had never seen anything like it.")
There are more than two hundred other items, but you get the idea. Some, such as old phonograph records, were collected by Ford as a child. Some were inherited from Ford's grandmother. Some were contributed by the kind of artist friends who like to find meanings in strange objects. Others could only have come from a garage sale at Dr. Frankenstein's workshop.
Founded by Ford in 1992, the MSM has led a footloose and threadbare existence, but nonetheless has all the features of its better-known brethren: a board, a membership organization (you can join at the "Carbohydrate level" for $4.95), volunteers, an insufficient budget, a newsletter ("The Electric Organ"), a "gift shoppe" with items at outrageous prices, and various contributions from various experts. The Sea-Monster, for example, was assembled for the MSM by a "crypto-zoologist," who may have emerged from the same gene pool as the oft-remarked-upon but never seen Prof. Josiah Carberry, professor of psychoceramics at Brown University.
The MSM also has special events, very special events, in fact, that have ranged from a photography show, "Big Fish & Good Lookin' Women" (featuring a live performance by transvestite comedian Cherie Tartt), to a minimalist cellist who played pieces that had only one or two notes. Bluegrass bands have provided entertainment on occasion and so have Elvis impersonators. All of this might lead you to think that Ford is just goofing off, but I think it goes deeper than that. Ford may be doing something important here.
All objects have meaning and many have stories, he says, but the meanings are only what we give them. It is my guess that Ford is a student of Symbolic Interaction Theory from the perspective of the Chicago School of Sociology. SIT grew out of the pragmatism of philosophers William James and John Dewey, was elaborated in the "Mind, Self and Society" lectures of George Herbert Mead, and more recently has influenced and been influenced by European post-structuralism and post-modernism. It argues that meaning isn't inherent in an object but, rather, derives from our experience with it and especially our interaction with each other (i.e., a chair isn't really a chair until we agree to ascribe qualities of "chairness" to it). While Kuhn and others at the University of Iowa insisted that concepts of symbolic interaction could be studied quantitatively, Mead and Herbert Blumler of the University of Chicago held that only case studies and histories offered such an avenue. Which may be why Ford is creating a museum of "objects with stories." He's creating a demonstration of epistemology, qualitatively derived.
On the other hand, he may just be pulling our chain.
My guess is that he's probably doing both and having a lot of fun. An MSM tour conducted by Ford proceeds with solemn explanations interrupted periodically by happy cackles. Ford, a genial man who was born in 1961 and is distantly related to the Fairbanks scale and museum people in St. Johnsbury, has as much suave as any high priest of the Met, the MFA, the Izzy, the Goog, or the Cork, including a mellifluous voice that could sell rocks to Vermont farmers. His career path has been rather squiggly, however: an art history major at Connecticut College, mural restoration work in New York City, five years driving a taxi in Boston. He makes no woulda-coulda-shoulda noises about all this, but instead seems to be having the time of his life being a "curator" (it pays better than being an artist, he says) and making ends meet by doing carpentry, painting restoration, and other work as it comes to hand. He came to northern New England, land of his ancestors, when he grew tired of the elitism of the the urban art scene. "I like it here," he says. "Vermont is very welcoming to eccentrics."
Yes, indeed. And that's how the usual toughs might dismiss him if they can't understand what's going on here. Ford has even suffered indignities at the hands of other professionals. Recently he received a postcard—a mere postcard!—from the Metropolitan Museum of Art asking that it be taken off the MSM's mailing list. What the hoity-toities don't appreciate is that the MSM is trying to make you think. Which is why Ford would like you to lend him your head. Having collected your head, however, Ford return it to you its wiring slightly re-arranged. You may leave his museum highly amused. Or perhaps you will have a re-thought your view of some of the things in your life: how, for example, the humblest of objects can be wrapped in stories and carry great meaning. (I'd rather exhibit a brick than a Faberge egg," says Ford. "The brick comes with the human stories of everyone who's handled it, while the egg may not.") Or perhaps some memories will have been stirred. (The MSM's acquisition methods may seem more like dumpster diving than anything else, but they are akin to the heterodoxy of the typical little country museum of long ago, which could house everything from Aunt Fanny's paintings to to a two-headed calf, all of it garlanded with memories. The MSM is very, very Old Vermont.) Or perhaps you will see things in a new way, whether from the underside of the other side. In any case, says Ford, you will have thought about the meaning of things a little differently, and then thought about what you thought.
"We provide a museum that people can get involved in directly, and it points out that objects in our everyday lives can have value," he explains. Providing open access to artists, artifact hunters, and the public is also important to Ford, who is committed to democratizing gallery space while satirizing stuffy art and museum elites. "The MSM proceeds as an experiment in curation," says Ford. "If we didn't do it, who would?"
Who would, indeed? so look for the Main Street Museum, wherever it is. Try a little chairness. But mind your head.
Jim Bissland, “Mind Your Head,” Long River Winding; Life, Love and Death Along the Connecticut, 1999. more here: http://www.countrymanpress.com/titles/LongRiverWinding.html
