This Belongs in a Museum
Bringing you museum-approved grammatical errors and typos since 2010.
Oh, and sorry - I DO NOT FOLLOW BACK!
I might have looked forward to eating lunch every day if my single mother, who happened to be an artist, had done this while I was growing up. But, you know, I guess she was too busy going to school, working three jobs, and shuffling me off to various babysitters that she barely had time to throw me a lunchables or a bag of cheetos so this obviously would never have happened. But it’s still cool! Someone should make a sandwich bag museum.
Illustrated Lunch Bags by Dad
Since 2008 graphic designer David LaFerriere has been drawing illustrations on his children’s sandwich bags. He photographs almost all of them. You can explore the entire collection on Flickr.
(via odditiesoflife)
I don’t know if I’m scared to fly, but I certainly hate it, especially when it involves long ass overseas trips. Always remember to take an airline that serves free alcohol or you’ll be sorry. Probably the worst part of traveling is all the time spent waiting in airports due to delayed or connecting flights. Instead of buying overpriced, shitty food or killing time by recharging your laptop, go to the library, museum and casino. Yes, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has all those things, plus “resting rooms” with reclining chairs you can nap in. Now that’s what I call a waste of time well spent. Oh, and you can even get married there. Geez…why go anywhere else? Everything you need is right at the freakin’ airport. So what is this airport museum like? Well, it’s actually a satellite of the Rijksmuseum. Located on Holland Boulevard, in the area behind the passport control between the E and F Pier, the museum is open every day from 7:00 until 20:00 (that’s a pretty long time, yo!) and admission is free. It houses a permanent exhibition of ten works by Dutch masters from the museum’s collection with new temporary exhibitions a few times a year. Believe it or not, this first-ever airport museum just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Anyway, I strongly support more airports doing this kind of thing. When I fly this summer, I fully expect to see pop-up museums in every terminal. And reclining chairs!
I HATE CONCEPTUAL ART! Nothing annoys me more than some rich kid finding a broken chair or bicycle in a dumpster, painting it or something, and then calling it “art”. Thank you, Marcel Duchamp. Anyway, I do give credit to dedicated conceptual artist Walter De Maria. His long-term installation piece, Earth Room, has been on display and open to the public for free continuously since I was born (or 1980 for the tens of thousands who do not know me personally). Visitors ring a nondescript buzzer at 141 Wooster Street in the middle of SoHo and walk up some stairs to a quiet room filled with 280,000 pounds of dirt. In case you’re wondering how De Maria affords to display and take care of a pile of dirt in the middle of Manhattan’s most expensive neighborhood, well, he is supported by the Dia Art Foundation and long-time caretaker Bill Dilworth. For the past three decades, Dilworth waters and rakes the dirt once a week, which brings about a distinct, rich scent that fills the loft. It sounds like Earth Room is better taken care of than most people’s gardens…or houses…or lives. Occasionally Dilworth notices a mushroom or two sprouting from the ground. HOW EXCITING! Even though I’m sure there are enough dirty lofts all over NYC growing shit naturally (maybe more than just mushrooms) without needing a pile of “dirt art.” But maybe I just don’t get it.
Galleries are the worst places to look at art. Unfortunately, they’re also often the only places to look at art. It’s a problem that’s been eating at me for almost as long as I’ve been painting. In the last hundred-fifty years or so the standard procedure is for an artist to make work in his…
Lovely illustrations by jenniferquinnart of the Manchester Museum, a place where I spent a lot of time during my Museum Studies programme either writing, studying, napping due to jet lag, going on a behind-the-scenes tour or just killing a bit of time. With the exception of the Art Institute of Chicago, this is a museum I probably know the best. These images take me right back.
When I visited Deutschland (or Germany for non-Germans) a few years back, I noticed their obsession with recycling. Everywhere you looked there was some kind of receptacle for a specific kind of material; blue for paper, yellow for plastic and metals, red for food and plant waste, etc. Glass is even sorted by colour. Anyway, it comes as no surpise to me that Germans are now transforming old flour sacks into art, or at least recognising their historical value. Yep, that’s right. The first Sunday of every month in Ahrensburg, the Flour Art Museum is open to the public. With nearly 3,000 bags from 122 countries in the exhibit, the museum starts with wheat around the world then moves the “myths” of the different cultures, like the story of the Old Wives Mill. In the Symbol Room, the international language of flour-sack symbols is discussed, where visitors learn about the popular motifs of locomotives and lions, and why a camel from Morocco means the same as a dragon in China. Ever heard of a Kleiekotzer? It literally translates to “bran puker”, it was a gargoyle-like mask found in old corn mills that “puked” the separated bran out of its mouth. I WANT ONE! The museum ends with the White Room, a feast for senses, and the Sackotheque, an archive of all the sacks arranged systematically according to their English names of their country of origin. I bet you’re wondering how this all started. Well, back in 1998 owner Volkmar Wywiol (who happens to make industrial baking products for a living) stumbled upon an empty flour sack on the beach in Dubai and thought about its connection with our international cultural heritage. And with that, another random museum was born. And the best part? There’s a book (of course) and if you happen to be a hoarder of old flour sacks, the museum wants it to be part of their collection. So send yours in today!!!
Artist Dorr Bothwell’s sketch of visitors at the San Francisco Art Museum in 1942, part of “A Day at the Museum”, a museum exhibit about museum exhibits at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, open through 2 June 2013. Some of the items on display include famous artists’ letters, recorded stories, diary entries as well as sketches and photographs of museum visitors.
In the hills of southern Austria is a farmhouse outbuilding that is home to the Weltmaschine (the World Machine). What is this, you ask? The creator of the machine, Franz Gsellmann, grew up hoping to become an engineer, which never happened because everybody knows dreams don’t come true. But after seeing the iconic Atomium building at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, Franz returned home with a model of the Atomium, emptied a room of his farm shed, and constructed an environment around it. Found mostly in second-hand markets or junkyards, the thousands of separate parts of the machine were taken home either by wheelbarrow or oxen, then assembled over a twenty-three year period, while working mostly in secret, to create a strange piece of Kinetic Art. Some of the random items include a ship’s propeller, two gondolas, a Dutch windmill, a Persian goblet, a salt and pepper set, five crucifixes, a hair dryer, 560 wooden beads, a glass Jesus and Mary statue, the Mercedes star logo, replicas of clock towers, eight lampshades, a barometer, an eagle made of porcelain, a model rocket from Japan, sixty-four bird whistles, a klopotec, two-hundred light bulbs, fifty-three light switches, an organ blower, fourteen bells, a xylophone, and much more. Phew!
The machine, about four feet long, two feet wide and four feet tall, is a quivering, vibrating, rotating, roaring, glowing and flashing device operated by twenty-five electric motors (see this video if you don’t believe me). With its constant motion and brightly painted surface the machine creates an endless blaze of sound, colour and light. And due to my sound sensitivity and motion sickness, I already have a splitting headache just thinking about it. Apparently when Franz switched the machine on for the first time, the whole village immediately suffered a blackout (kind of like the Super Bowl on Sunday after Beyonce’s performance, which I did not watch, by the way). Anyway, Franz was proud of his work, cleaning each part every single day. He felt his work was complete and glued a piece of mirror to the gadget with the inscription (translated from Deutsch): “For this short life with toil and sweat have I wought. In the next world I shall do fairer labour for God.” But he died in 1981 before sharing the machine’s true purpose (if there ever was one, but I am sure it was heavenly) with the world, and how to fix the darn thing if it ever broke. Would the World survive without its Creator? By 1993 the company VA Zeltweg restored partial function to the machine. Today with continued sponsorship, the farm and Franz’s workshop, still owned by his family, is open to visitors, which number in the tens of thousands every year. Some people believe the Weltmaschine represents the inner workings of the soul (huh…machines have souls???) but whatever its meaning, those who have seen it in person never forget it.
We interrupt historic house museum week to bring you an important message. For the first and maybe only time ThisBelongsinaMuseum has a guest writer. Even though I once briefly mentioned this place in the early days of the blog, Chicago artist and writer Dmitry Samarov was nice enough to share his personal visit with us. If you’re not familiar with Dmitry, please check out his artwork, his book, and even his tumblr. I highly recommend them all. Enjoy.
Driving down an utterly generic commercial road past McDonald’s, car dealerships, office buildings and such didn’t prepare me in any way for where we’d end up. My girlfriend, Shay, had been talking about the place for months, and then, at 9:30am on a Monday morning, there we were. Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri. A nondescript building with an empty lot, betraying no clue of what was behind its locked doors. The museum is actually not open on Mondays but we’d made an appointment. As the minutes crawled by though it looked like there would be no hair museum for us this day. We gave up around 10:15 and hit the road.
Did Leila forget about us? Did we get the time mixed up somehow? Whatever the case, when we were about 25 miles away and I was telling her that we’d definitely visit another time, Shay got a text message from her office back home: “The Hair Museum is looking for you.” Seconds later there was a call from Leila herself, saying she could meet us at 11:30. We got off at the next exit and sped back to Independence.
Leila Cohoon is a small woman with perfectly-set platinum hair and many pieces of eye-catching jewelry. She unlocks the doors of her museum and lets us in. Inside is a small reception area hung nearly floor to ceiling with antique shadowbox frames. In each frame are wreaths, decorations, landscapes, and every other sort of design one could dream of. All are made of hair.
Leila has traced the art of hairwork back to at least the 1500s but believes it goes back much earlier. Not only has she collected hair decorations and jewelry for over 40 years but she has also managed to learn many of the arthritis-inducing techniques necessary to complete these creations. Flowers, figures, and animals, all made of knots and stitches of multicolored tresses. She points out each skill she’s mastered as we make our way around her lobby. She says she knows 30 techniques while 5 others have thus far eluded her. She leaves no doubt by her tone that it’s only a matter of time until she knows them all. We continue into the back room. Every square inch of wall space is spoken for. In the middle of the room glass cases hold rings, necklaces, brooches, and reliquaries, all decorated with human or animal hair.
Leila tells us about the history of many of her prized possessions. Some were made to memorialize a loved one’s passing, others to celebrate impending nuptials, while still others’ intent is a complete mystery. She has traveled the world to find items for her museum and her single-minded passion for the subject of hairwork is fairly awe-inspiring. Here is a person who has taken an unusual interest and turned it into a life’s work.
Leila tells us she won’t give her collection to the Smithsonian—though they keep asking—because she wants to make sure that people can easily see her treasures. She doesn’t want them shut away in some climate-controlled safe forever. She’s also writing a book about the history of hairwork. In the meantime, she’ll teach you those 30 techniques if you sign up for one of her classes.
Shay is already planning her trip back to Missouri.
Why would you want to visit Paris when you can just go to the South of France and see the trash version (not to be confused with Paris Hilton or the hotel in Las Vegas) for free? For almost two decades Gerard Brion has been recreating landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Sacré Coeur, out of rubbish in his back garden. The work starts in his studio where Brion handcrafts pieces of his authentic-looking mini-version of the City of Lights. It’s springtime year round at Brion’s house. Pieces of cardboard, soup cans, baby food jars and old concrete blocks were all used in the making of this new tourist attraction in Vaissac, France. It is not officially open to the public, but small group tours take place once or twice a week. Amongst the well-manicured flower beds and hedges in Brion’s backyard, visitors can see most of Paris, only in miniature form. Occasionally small portions of the already small Paris are lent to Parisian museums, so mini-Paris gets to see BIG Paris, which is nice. I wonder if this is what the dude in Casablanca meant when he said, “We’ll always have Paris.” Or was he talking about Paris, Texas? Hmmm…I might have to watch the movie now to find out.*
*Hey, I thought A Night in Casablanca counted as the real thing? SORRY!
