I want to see the Linden-Museum of Stuttgart's current show which features a bunch of Siberian Shamanic items that haven't ever left the area before. 200 pieces. Museums are a great love of mine, because I tend to be able to feel the waves of experience coming off the stuff, and can just sit there and bask in the glow of a psychic history lesson.
When I was little, the Denver Art Museum put all the Native American Indian things in a jumble in floor-to-ceiling glass cases. Nations, tribes, were mixed, tourist-trade items with authentic tools. It sure wasn't anthropologically clean, but it was a banquet for the imagination. The mad mix of it developed the child's artists' eye. I didn't care then that Harvey tourist trade items were set next to rare and authentic parfleche purses. All the dresses decorated with elks' teeth were together. It was like a group of women were really there. You could feel it.
Then someone got the brilliant idea to Teach the Public what They Should Know about History. Some body thought it was better to inform and teach and bore-to-death, than to ignite the interest. This is why we now have museums filled with items, 90% of which can only rarely be viewed, tucked safely away from our greedy eyes. This is why now, there are what feels like 18 items in the Native American area, isolated from all the others in plexiglass cases and spot lit so as to keep everything uncontaminable as an operating theatre.
It means everyone has to walk around the exhibits whispering as if they are in the presence of the Holy Grail and it is a Privilege to Even be Able to Witness them. No mad jumble of actually-used implements, here. No chalk and plaster mannikins of babies stuck in the papooses to make you love them. Just objects, displayed with the precision of an obsessive-compulsive archivist.
Give me the real disorder, instead. I learn more from a person at their yard sale, surrounded by their once-loved or simply-collected things, than I would by seeing eight of their possessions reverently framed on the wall in a white gallery.
The show in Stuttgart, I might just be able to swing getting to. I know it will likely feature the modern style of museum curation, and give me nibbles rather than big bites to fill my mind with. But it would be a great chance to see and feel these things. Sure, it would be even better if they were in a real yurt on the wind swept plain with ponies nickering under snowfall and the scent of boiling komyss.
