- July 23rd, 2008
- Filed under Art, Exhibitions
Some tigers are saber-toothed and stuffed; others are rendered in chrome. Two museums brought me closer to wildness this summer: the Indiana State Museum’s Footprints exhibition and the new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, WI.
At the ISM, Footprints features taxidermy to die for. In an exploration of the natural history of what is today Indiana, stuffed ice age sabertooths cavort with stuffed otters, owls, fish and badgers, arranged in an unintentionally surreal tableau. This is installation art if I’ve ever seen it: a barrage of lives that were, juxtaposed for maximum emotional impact. Later in the show, there are piercing black-and-white photos of Indiana’s hunting history. The eyes of the hunters and their giddy hounds smolder with pride in front a wall of raccoon skins, circa 1935. Footprints has a high haunt factor.
The Harley-Davidson Museum, on the other hand, is pure exaltation. This cathedral to industrial design and American capitalism opened just this month after a multi-year planning process. Founded in 1903 by two pals (Bill Harley and Arthur Davidson) pimping bikes in a shed, Harley-Davidson is now global. Designed by Pentagram —the same firm the IMA is working with now on branding and wayfinding—the museum building is gutsy urban chic on a 20-acre plot in downtown Milwaukee, and a new biker mecca, no doubt.
Inside, there’s a motorcycle preservation lab, a stylistic gallery of engines and gas tanks, a social history of Harleys, and a slanted video screen with Evel Knievel footage. (The café’s corn-and-barley salad with tarragon pesto dressing was also super yum). Though the whole place could easily fall into the corporate propaganda category, I came away with an appreciation for the artistry of automotive engineering, an expanded concept of rugged American coolness, and a crush on the sexed-up architecture.
Both exhibitions raise questions about agendas in museums. Museums are by nature mediated experiences. How do artifact selection, building design and didactic language work on you? An object—an embarrassed-looking stuffed fox or a vintage Harley Electra Glide Sport—can leave you reeling.
We like to noodle on these issues at the IMA. The question of mediation or interpretation is especially interesting in the case of IMA’s Art & Nature Park slated to open in 2009. You can’t hang a label on a cloud. So we’re looking for ways to create dialogue between art and nature in visitors’ minds in surprising ways.
If you’ve had any memorable museum pilgrimages this summer, or meditations on museum objects with impact, do tell.
