Joe Citro, "Re/Collections"
Excerpts from a Commentary for Vermont Public Radio, June, 2001
Re/Collections, by Joseph A. Citro
In Burlington, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum has been going through their hidden holdings and discovering exhibits that haven't been seen for as much as 120 years...Objects that might have evoked gasps of wonder from our ancestors, are likely to provoke gasps of horror from our politically correct contemporaries. For example, where else can you see a scabbard for a sword and two daggers, fashioned from a baby crocodile?
Curator Janie Cohen has joined forces with guest curator David Fairbanks Ford, whose Main Street Museum in White River Junction is often called “The strangest museum in Vermont.” Mr. Ford is a curiosity himself, an engaging hybrid of historian [and] humorist. He has combined some of his collection with discoveries from the Fleming and has synthesized something new...that feels old. But its the art of the forgotten, the shunned, the unsettled, and the unsettling—displayed in Victorian solemnity. What Mr. Ford and Ms. Cohen have originated is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. But if we were to look at the components individually we would see, for example, a nasty spear made of poisoned sharks’ teeth. A cluster of delicately carved sea birds, so tiny they’re best seen with a magnifying glass. And a real show-stopper, a carefully mounted blue bottle containing what's left of the salve used to treat Phineas Gage's celebrated head-wound. All this apparent chaos and incongruity forces one to contemplate the nature of museums, and curating...
In the 1930s a woman donated a glass tumbler to the Fleming. A glass tumbler? So what? Then she explained that it had arrived on the Mayflower. Suddenly it took on additional allure. A curator long-gone wrote on its label, “But can she prove it?” It doesn't matter. Today the original tumbler has disappeared—but a stand-in is exhibited in its place. But I can't prove it...
And there are heads. The head of a Northern Cardinal preserved in a glass case. A human skull with a hole in it—not Phineas Gage—but proof that brain surgery is older than we think. And there is a shrunken head. Not the kind you see in novelty shops, but a “real” one, handmade in Ecuador from animal parts—a hot tourist item among 19th century sailors. It doesn't take long to see that as unusual, grim, even macabre as some of these exhibits might be, there is a sense of play and humor about it all, a good-natured confrontation with the arrogance behind any museum’s authoritative facade. At the same time it’s an excellent reminder that none of us should take it, or ourselves, too seriously.
—This is Joe Citro.
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