Exhibition: Breaking the Mode

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Exhibition: On Procession

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Exhibition: To Live Forever

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Exhibition: Power and Glory

Something new is coming in January!

What is your favorite of 2008?  Let us know whether it is something listed here or something completely different.

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.

120 feet of words to be exact. Jack Kerouac captured the beating heart of a generation – one of wanderers, writers, and dreamers – with his iconic novel On the Road, written in one sweeping session of 20 days in the spring of 1951.

The single piece of paper (which is really tracing paper sheets taped together), ancient in its tea-like stain and torn edges, personal in its hand-written corrections, and inspiring in its fervent immediacy, is a testament to all that is, or was, “Beat” – a more free approach to self-expression, non-conformity, a bohemian lifestyle, among many other characteristics. The Beats wrote about sex, drugs, jazz – more than enough to shock our postwar nation’s elders and enough to invigorate their children. Kerouac compiled notes from journeys across America to create the closely autobiographical nature of On The Road, sometimes accompanied by anyone from Neal Cassady to Allen Ginsberg. Even though there was exceptional attention paid to Kerouac’s fortnight feat, the novel had been taking form long before the author’s almost overnight success, in between scribbling lines at Cassady’s and exploring each state he visited in great detail.

How did the scroll end up here? Aside the fact that it is on tour at museums and libraries across the country, Indianapolis Colt’s owner Jim Irsay bought the scroll in 2001 and Jim Canary of Indiana University has been its conservator since.

To me, the beauty of On the Road is its timeless appeal of the great American road trip we all want to take, with those fearless zealots that we call friends and the never-ending search for inspiration in a world that becomes all to familiar with daily life.

Who’s who in On The Road

Real-life person/Character name

Jack Kerouac / Sal Paradise
Gabrielle Kerouac / Sal’s Aunt
Alan Ansen / Rollo Greb
William S. Burroughs / Old Bull Lee
Joan Vollmer / Jane
Lucien Carr / Damion
Neal Cassady /Dean Moriarty
Carolyn Cassady / Camille
Hal Chase / Chad King
Henri Cru / Remi Boncoeur
Bea Franko / Terry
Allen Ginsberg / Carlo Marx
Diana Hansen / Inez
Joan Haverty / Laura
Luanne Henderson / Mary Lou
Al Hinkle / Ed Dunkel
Helen Hinkle / Galatea Dunkel
Jim Holmes / Tom Snark
John Clellon Holmes / Tom Saybrook
Herbert Huncke / Elmer Hassel
Frank Jeffries / Stan Shephard
Allen Temko / Roland Major
Bill Tomson / Roy Johnson
Ed Uhl / Ed Wall

On the Road Again with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank is open at the IMA now through September 21.