mim’s blog

Just in time for passover… I recently saw the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philly. It’s been advertised heavily both here and there, there was a giant banner hanging down one side of Madison Square Garden with this picture of one of Tut’s canopic jars. Overall, the artifacts were incredible, but the exhibit itself a bit underwhelming.

The exhibit was approximately divided in half, the first being pre-Tut, and the second actually from Tut’s tomb itself. They didn’t have Tut’s mummy’s mask, but there were a lot of smaller things. The two most impressive aspects of the artifacts were the brilliance of the blue faience, and the condition and quality of the wood and the wood inlay. King Tut lived about 3300 years ago, and the blue was still rich enough to make you stop and say, “wow.” And as far as the woodwork goes, there was a chair on exhibit that looked like it could have been made a few years ago, with incredible inlaid designs and what looked like very skilled craftsmanship in general.

While the artifacts were incredible, the informational aspect of the exhibit was certainly lacking. Reading the wikipedia article on King Tut afterwards, I was struck by its similarity to some of the captions in the exhibit. Many of them repeated information in previous descriptions and there was little in the way of a map, timeline, or informational overview. It would have been nice to see what the actual tomb looked like, to read about the supposed curse of King Tut, to see where the tomb was located relative to other famous tombs, and so forth. Except for National Geographic, the companies that put the show together seem very much focused on entertainment, as opposed to education. There was even a cheesy soundtrack which, Joanne kept complaining, sounded like the general midi soundbank.

The one piece of information that stuck with me, though, was that by the time Tutankhamun ascended the throne, the Great Pyramid at Giza was already 1000 years old.

I went to the Brooklyn Museum with my parents on the last day of Annie Leibovitz’s show. It was packed when we got there, but was even more packed as we were leaving. After hearing Liz rave about it, I wanted to check it out for myself. On the whole, I have to say I was a little disappointed with her work, but I really liked Ron Mueck’s sculptures in the next room.

The sculptures were of the hyper-realistic variety, either very small or very large people accurately captured down to the wrinkles on their elbows and the five o’clock shadow on their chins. I’m not talking about a gray-smudged jowl, I’m talking about thousands of hairs meticulously inserted into fiberglass or silicone skin. There were veins, there were eyelashes, there were sagging midsections. You almost expected them to move or blink or at least tell the enormous crowds to mind their own business. Looking at them felt like looking at three dimensional photographs, capturing a moment in time. Not only were they physically realistic, but the moments that they captured seemed very emotionally real as well, all of the people seemed to be feeling strong emotions at the moment they were frozen. This mask looks like it might wake up at any time even though it’s four feet long.

Leibovitz’s stuff I was less keen on. She did photograph a lot of celebrities, but it seemed like it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time. Since she was photographing for the cover of Rolling Stone, she does a good job of capturing the personae that celebrities want to project. She does not capture the true person behind the mask. There was a picture of GW Bush and cabinet that was well executed, but in no way revealed any character or personality of the subjects. It was cleverly juxtaposed with a picture of Michael Moore and crew, which was entertaining, but I didn’t even feel that I could see into the liberals any better. There were lots of family photos, which could have been showing anyone’s family and were generally unremarkable. The stories behind them were interesting and moving, but the photographs themselves were not so much.

One picture that I did find quite moving was of a fallen bicycle on a blood stained road. It was taken on a trip to Sarajevo during the war. The rider had been hit by a mortar and died on the way to the hospital in Leibovitz’s car. Another that I quite like is the photograph of Nicole Kidman that the museum used to advertise the show. Quite dramatic and rich. The most interesting aspect of the show was that Leibovitz managed to photograph so many celebrities, not anything that was captured in the photos themselves.

While I was home for the holidays I saw Body Worlds at the Franklin Institute. The basic idea is that people will their bodies to Gunther von Hagens when they die and he preserves them and presents the bodies as educational exhibits. The first two thirds of the exhibit was a straight anatomy lesson and was very interesting. Each body system had a couple of complete bodies devoted to it, in various stages of dissection, but there were also lots of bits and pieces of bodies around to show specific parts or pathologies. The lymph system was sadly neglected, as usual, but the exhibit was plenty long without it.

Just looking at the bodies revealed some interesting things. I was surprised at how small both the lungs and kidneys are compared to the other internal organs. I was also surprised by all of the nerves shooting off of the spinal cord and all around the body. The display of a woman eight months pregnant raised quite a few eyebrows, but I found it quite educational. It answered the question of how does a whole baby fit in there (there isn’t much room to spare).

The various diseased body systems were also fascinating. Before the exhibit I was under the impression that functioning body systems were pretty similar from individual to the next. Not so. Just because you’re still alive doesn’t mean that everything’s normal under the hood. The surprise of the evening was the body’s ability to survive in the face of gross deformations of the liver, kidneys, heart, aorta, etc.

The last third of the exhibit was less about the anatomy and more about showing people without their skin in interesting poses. In addition, each “sculpture” was signed by von Hagens. This section was I’m sure what he was most proud of and his favorite part of the job, but I found it to be in questionable taste. It was interesting, but these were people quite recently. How would you like to see Aunt Wilma without her skin in a contortionistic yoga pose? I exaggerate, but you get the idea.

Yesterday I went with Graham to see the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. From the picture of the man with his hoary beard way down to there, I always imagined him to be something of a stuffy fellow, but all signs point to the contrary. The exhibits on the voyage of the Beagle were the most entertaining. It seemed that Chuck’s first reaction to meeting any sort of new animal was to put it in his mouth. He did have a history of going into the voyage, founding a rare animal-eating club as a college man, as depicted in the Marlon Brando / Matthew Broderick movie “The Freshman”. But while circumnavigating the globe he tried out armadillos, sea iguanas, giant Galapagos tortoises (they could fit 700 on the boat at once and at 200 pounds of meat a pop, that was a lot of meat!), and my personal favorite, the lesser Rhea. Apparently he’d been looking for this bird for quite some time only to discover the first one on his own dinner plate. He quickly grabbed the uneaten head, legs, feathers, etc., shoved them into a box and shipped them back to Cambridge for cataloguing. For all of the effort the bird was (re)named for him, Darwin’s Rhea. The boys back in Cambridge must have thought it a bit odd that he’d packed it in barbecue sauce instead of the standard formaldehyde. It made both Graham and me breath a little easier about our graduate school experiences.