QUOTES AND CASE STUDY FROM BOOK BY L EMMA THORSEN
'As Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence has observed, "Whenever a human being confronts a living creature, whether in actuality or by reflection, the 'real-life' animal is accompanied by an inseparable image of the animal's essence that is made up of, or influenced by, preexisting individual, cultural or societal conditioning.' 3
'...the exhibit addressed some of the diverse and often problematic methods of representing animals that have developed since the eighteenth century. Including drawings, photographs, sculptures, motion pictures, preserved animal bodies and scientific instruments, it sought not merely to represent animals, but to present some of the ways in which animals are themselves represented. - to draw attention to the representational practices as they manifest across a range of sites and contexts, including the art gallery itself.' 4
'In some cases, such as zoos and natural history museums, the materiality of the animal was foregrounded and privileged to emphasize how it could come to define the animal itself, even when enclosure fences, Plexiglass covers or glass cases frame human interactions with it. In other instances, such as illustrations and photography, the animal's presence was interpreted as at once more dimensional and more spectral. Within the modern tradition of Western natural history, a strong emphasis on realism has oriented representations of animals according to accepted conventions of what is most lifelike- in short, animals as they really are. Yet upon closer scrutiny, it becomes evident that what is ultimately presented are representations of animals as they really are for the producers of the representations themselves, for even while these representations aspire to empiricism and objectivity from the perspective of a detatched observer, they fail to escape their social-historical context. ' 5
The Frames of Specimens: Glass Cases in the Bergen Museum Around 1900 - Brita Brenna
'culture of glass' 35
'Live animals are offered to the viewer as though they were stuffed animals in a museum diorama, in a glass case. Pet shops offer the same experience, presenting animals staged in total visibility behind glass. [-john berger - returning look of animal ... ] Indeed, glass allows us to be in visual communication with the animal. But what does man become aware of when looking through a glass pane? Glass allows communication but prevents anything other than scopic engagement. The whole of nature will look different through glass, Scheerbart contended, and so my concern is to interrogate what glass as a medium does to the experience of animal nature.' 38
"Glass cases fulfil multifarious functions, the most obvious being to make visible and to make untouchable; simultaneous display and protection. Where can we trace their history?" 39
"All knowledge requires a container," she (Anke te Heesen) claims, outlining a short history of the storage of knowledge. The chest and the case for relics were the prevalent forms in the middle ages. Gradually, the buffet developed into a form that contained both open shelves and closed containers, thus both exposing and enclosing the contents.' 40
"During the 19th century, glass became an indispensable tool for making museum nature. To paraphrase Scheerbart, who awaited a new sensitivity to nature developing through the glass and iron buildings of the twentieth century, nature would now be seen in a completely new light.' 41
'As has been thoroughly shown elsewhere, natural history as well as anthropology collections of the 19th century were deeply embedded in global economic systems of trade and exploitation - that is, in colonialism.' 44
'I have emphasized these exchanges of specimens, not because they were particular to Bergen but because they show the extent to which natural history museums were part of networks that produced museum nature. The museum was only one of the sites where this process took place, and the nature that became visible there was a result of a long chain of negotiations and transformations.' 44
'Networks for the collection of scientific specimens were accompanied by networks for standardizing display.' 45
'In this, display cases had important functions to fulfill. They took part in shaping new divisions within the museum, they materialized pedagogic principles, and they helped create variously coded spaces within the museum.' 45
'The major difference between what objects are made to be in the two spaces lies principally in the distance created by the unavailability of objects in the public part of museums. Because of the unflinching use of glass to cover the objects, they are also rendered permanently inaccessible to the visitor. In the display case, nature emerged as already identified and known. In the storage room, nature would make room for uncertainty. In the first instance, the objects are stilled and frozen, whereas a working collection would be dynamic as curators moved objects in and out of cases to work with them, or entered new objects into the museum. In the public department, the object is made singular; in the research department, the objects are turned into part of a series. [...] 49
'What do glass cases actually do? Andrew Zimmerman has written about glass cases in anthropological museums in the same period, pointing out that they were utilized for one special purpose: as a machinery to make anthropological objects into non-art, "as objects of natural science in the first place." Looking at pictures from Bergen, I can easily agree that the animals in the cases seem to be installed within a machinery that transforms them into objects of science, but this is a truism. They were regarded as natural science all along; in fact, they were part of the machinery that made glass cases into tools for rendering something as natural science.
What is more disturbing is the difficulty of seeing animals within the glass cases in the various pictures. The plates of glass in the cases act as barriers that lock the animal up, making them not just untouchable for our hands but inaccessible for our gaze. Isobel Armstrong argues that glass was just as important as a barrier to sight as it was a medium for sight in the Victorian Age. That is to say, there was a great interest in what glass did to our vision, and how it could prevent, as well as enable, good looking. Looking at the many pictures of museum galleries from this period, the degree to which the glass cases have become the most important features of the rooms is striking. They prevent our investigation of the objects, throwing themselves on us with a insistence of their particular materiality. The great paradox is that they were installed in the museums to make museum nature visible and legible for the greatest possible number of people. In the photographs, they refuse us access to this museum nature. "Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets," Benjamin wrote, continuing, "It is also the enemy of possession." 54
Preserving History: Collecting and Displaying in Carl Akeley's In Brightest Africa - Nigel Rothfels
"According to Osborn, what makes Akeley's account important is its focus not on killing animals but on saving them. For most readers, though, this may seem a surprising claim, because the core of In Brightest Africa remains the telling of adventures shooting this or that species [...]
The distinction is important to make because, first, it puts the claims of sport hunters who were also museum collectors in needed perspective, and second, it illuminates what can be called the 'preservation paradox' that motivated people like Ackeley - that killing, photographing and pickling animals should be understood as practices of preserving them, of saving them.' 59
'The photograph of the ass on the back of the camel, then, functions precisely like a trophy shot because it plays a pivotal role in explaining the significance of the animals death to audiences back home. Unlike the typical trophy shot, however, the story here is of the tragic death of an animal and this is the critical point about Akeley.' 68
'Akeley did not want to simply store the bodies of animals in liquid spirits (the equivalent in his time to collecting genetic material); he wanted to somehow capture a moment of the life-ness of the animal through his taxidermy. Working almost entirely with just the surface of the animal, and placing that over a frame and a form that would somehow bring that surface back to life, Akeley sought to freeze a moment of an animal's life, to save that animal and even species from their apparently inevitable absolute destruction.' 69
Interacting with The Watchful Grasshopper; or, Why Live Animals Matter in Twentieth-Century Science Museums - Karen A. Rader
'A master popularizer, (Frank) Lutz believed that static, "dead" displays (however beautiful) would not help make visitors want to learn more about entomology. "It is mighty difficult to make dead insects look happy on or under a sheet of celluloid water," he wrote. As early as the 1920s, Lutz expressed interest in building a habitat group of aquatic insects, but the underfunded entomology department could not compete for resources with other research. So Lutz took matters into his own hands: he put bows of water with live aquatic insects and plants into exhibition cases. Encouraged by visitors' responses, Lutz next exhibited a wire cage of "trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches," on which, he recalled, "even New Yorkers stopped to gaze."
"The evolution of museum material which has been from the very dead to the almost life-like is not going to stop there but is going to take the next and apparently logical step," Lutz concluded.' 178
'When the Exploratorium was founded in 1969, its exhibit designers took "science in action" to a new level. Director Frank Oppenheimer envisioned a series of exhibits on perception that would demonstrate communalities in the way plants, animals and human beings perceived stimuli; these would complement the successful hands-on physics exhibits that formed the core of the Exploratorium's existing displays. Oppenheimer hesitated before building life-science displays, because he was worried that live plants and animals would transform the Exploratorium into a zoo or a botanical garden or, worst of all, into a traditional museum that housed specimen collections. Living specimens demand ongoing care; they would require the Exploratorium to hire trained biologists, whose interests and skills would likely be entirely different to those of the freewheeling exhibit builders he wanted to court.'
The Watchful Grasshopper Case Study Scan
... question was not charismatic megafauna but rather belonged to an aggressive agricultural pest insect." 186
"The insect subject is often figured as some-how "not an animal" or "not as much an animal" as vertebrates." 186
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETzIUFaw0Y
