This Belongs in a Museum
Bringing you museum-approved grammatical errors and typos since 2010.
Oh, and sorry - I DO NOT FOLLOW BACK!
“Suggestion Week” (something I made up, it’s not as important or exciting as Banned Books Week) continues with one from tonyrios87 who informed me about the existence of the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland. As you guessed by the name of the town, this is the home of the famous cheese, but it’s also where artist Hans Rudolph Giger permanently houses his surreal, nightmarish work. In case you didn’t already know, Giger is a well-known Swiss painter and sculptor, who won an Oscar for his designs on the film Alien. Opened fifteen years ago inside the Château St. Germain, the museum permanently displays the largest collection of Giger’s works from the early 1960s through the present, including ‘The Spell’ and the ‘Passages’ series, as well as his designs from the Alien and Dune movies. Directly across the street, the Skeleton Bar (furnished by Giger of course), is an otherworldly, cavernous structure crisscrossed with vertebrae arches and decorated with skulls and what appear to be dead babies. Not sure if this thing pops out and sings for the patrons, but it should. So basically this sounds like a lovely outing with the wife and kids. Eat some cheese, look at disturbing art and drink a pint in a skeleton bar. It sounds just like my last family vacation.
We all have opinions on what is considered “real art”. As someone who grew up with a mom who was a struggling artist, I have many thoughts on this subject, and have covered it a few times already on this blog. I still have the vivid memory of an older student in one of my art history classes going on and on about how Picasso couldn’t draw (um…he could…have you seen his earlier work?) and how much she loved Norman Rockwell. Well, my apologies for sounding like an artsy fartsy snob, but the late Thomas Kinkade was not an artist, he was a businessman. And we all know this is very true, after all he was America’s most-collected living artist, making well over 70 million dollars. His paintings of glowing, oversaturated stone cottages in woodsy environments are supposedly found in one in every twenty American homes, including the White House. Shame on you, Mr. President!
If most museologists believe today’s museums exist only to make money, then the Thomas Kinkade National Archive Gallery fits right in with this world. Located in the historic Harry A. Greene Mansion in Monterey, California, the archive has the largest display of Kinkade “originals”, including some of his earliest known work. And of course there is a gift shop. Hey, where you do think that chick in the photo got her copy of The Thomas Kinkade Story? I mean we’re talking about a guy who licensed his “art” with Hallmark and other corporations like Walmart making it nearly impossible to never see one of his images. Try to escape…you can’t! Since his death last April, there are plans to establish a legacy for the “Painter of Light” with a more official museum and cultural center. While some of you start to prepare for the apocalypse and others attempt to contain your excitement at the thought of a real Thomas Kinkade Museum, let me leave you with this quote from writer Joan Didion:
“A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”
Miquel Àngel Joan (dude needs to eat a sandwich) of Majorca, Spain has a website called “The Strange Museum: Travelling Exhibition of Broken Toys” (pause the sound on your computer if you don’t want to hear annoying, repetitive music). I have no idea how real this thing is, but I found out the artist goes by the name Llonovoy (yo no voy ~ ‘do it without me’), which explains why it is so prominently featured on his site. It’s his name. And what artist doesn’t want you to know his or her name? Actually the official name of the museum is L’Estrany Museu Llonovoy or Llonovoy’s Curioseum. According to one of Miguel’s friends, the museum is a “collection of impossible toys, manufactured from objects trouvés provided with a new life and charged with a critical sense that ranges from the naïf to the antimilitarist.” Huh? Wha? My brain just oozed out of my ears and is now dripping onto my computer keyboard. My eyes are in a permanent roll due to the awful pretentiousness of this whole goddamn thing. Miguel Llonovoy Whatshisname reminds me of my museology days when there was this one dude (actually he’s now a Doctor of Museums) who’d get a hard-on whenever big words were used when discussing the context and meaning of art. Wonder why museum visitors don’t read object labels? It’s because curators do whatever they can to make sure a certain number of big words are used in the writing of those labels, even if they don’t actually give any context to the art piece they’re supposedly describing. It’s more important to prove how smart they are, and not about an enjoyable experience for the visitor. Oh, did this just turn into a rant? Oops. Well, anyway it looks like Llonovoy turns old toys into art. I’m guessing he thinks they’re broken because they lack context and meaning, but his magical artistic skills have now given them…you guessed it…new context and meaning. Yay!
Tomorrow might be American Independence Day, but let’s not forget that other countries celebrate their freedoms too. Maybe not with hot dogs and beer and fireworks and loud, drunk people but still…freedom isn’t always annoying-free. Uh…can you tell it is my least favorite holiday?
One country we have not yet visited on this blog, and who just happens to be celebrating their own independence day today (the liberation of Minsk from the Nazis by the Soviets in 1944), is Belarus. So what better way to honor the place than with a visit to a little known museum, once the home and workshop of Zair Azgur, one of the most celebrated Belarusian artists of the Soviet era. His plaster busts of soldiers as well as State and Party leaders (hey, there’s a giant head of Karl Marx at the entrance) are displayed in his home turned museum. With over 400 original sculptures, most found in floor-to-ceiling shelves on the second floor, there is also an area dedicated to Zair’s life with photos, archival documents and information on his family, including artist wife Galina. Before his death in 1995, he was awarded the Order of Lenin twice and received a number of other medals. His work still graces many plinths throughout the former empire.
If you’ve read this blog long enough, then you probably already know I have a thing for hoarders. I used to work for one (that didn’t work out so well) and have a family member (or two) whose baby toe is slightly keeping them out of the deep end of the hoarding pool. As a museologist, I find the accumulation of stuff fascinating, whether it’s collected in a museum display case or kept in a pile in the garage. We all like crap, maybe some more than others. Someone who definitely followed the hoarder path was Sylvia Gray of Greensboro, North Carolina. She once ran a thrift store for 58 years. Shit piled up to the ceiling because she never threw anything out. Besides the fact that she shopped twice a day at the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores always bringing back more and more stuff. When she died 15 years ago, her grandson (who happens to be an artist) turned the shop into a museum called the Elsewhere Collaborative. He wanted to preserve her collection but also give new life to the space. Nothing is for sale or leaves the building, but resident artists are allowed to alter or create new meanings to all the objects amassed by Miss Sylvia. It’s nice that he turned what some people would see as a negative into a positive and created a living history/art museum. Or let’s just call it what it really is…a hipster’s paradise.
(Flickr: Elsewhere Artist Collaborative) (Flickr: OrigamiKid)
This is all over the internet, but I had to repost because I am a bit obsessed with architecture and abandonment. An artist named Ofra Lapid, who lives and works in Tel-Aviv, wastes time on the internet like the rest of us. But she actually does something productive with her web activity, which I wish I could say was true with the shit I do. Anyway, Ofra found an amateur photographer from North Dakota who documents decaying or abandoned buildings, either neglected by man or destroyed by weather. She turns the photos into small scale models, then photographs them again in isolation and calls the work “Broken Houses”.
