Butterflies

[smokingboot]

The temporary butterfly house outside the Natural History museum is just wonderful. A few of us went to check it out, and we had our doubts. See, you have to go through the maze to get into it, and the maze is full of education. It is also inevitably full of children with deely boppers on their heads, doing caterpillar walks and butterfly dances; they fled the fearful raven and played table football with ants; they may even have learned something. All we learned is that we would not be great mums. We ran into the butterfly house to get away from their enthusiasm only to find ourselves suddenly transformed into 8 year olds cooing 'Oooohlookatthatoneisn'titbig/pretty/lookatthe colours/ ohlookhe'seatingbanana
throughhiscombything /there'soneonthegroundoooh/thatonesamothinnitcositshairy/there'sloadsofthem ooooooo!' There was a wardrobe with hundreds of different sized pupae hanging in it; the whole thing looked like some leprechaun cobbler's workshop. It was magical.It's a good thing they weren't offering face painting at the end of the experience, we'd have gone for it.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/amazing-butterflies/index.html?cam=hp-promo

I found some tiny violets growing on a small plot of land inhabited principally by old cans. It's the first time I've ever seen them in the wild.* Sweet.

I've decided I like Spring:-)

*No, not the cans. We've all heard of feral can colonies.

Comments

[lucyas.livejournal.com]

I'd seen the adverts and been tempted - you have convinced me I have to go!

[jadeent.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to mention this to you. I think we should go (after the school holidays).

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

It is lovely. I suspect you'll enjoy it immensely, if you can bear the army of under-eights guarding the entrance!

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

I would love to see that - just for the live butterflies (though London does have a large butterfly house already, I have not been there). Suzette can't stand them though - while I used to sit in fields (before I started suffering from terrible hay fever) and let butterflies settle on me, she tends to run from them as she hates creepy crawlies.

I must confess though that I liked the old style Natural History museum with its rows of cases of stuffed animals and butterflies mounted on boards far more than the new 'interactive' one. I liked being able to stop and examine a specimen at my leisure ( as an artist its incredibly valuable), and the pervading sense of morbid collectivity had a strange appeal to my darker side... oddly, by removing all the death they have made it rather lifeless and sterile for me.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a very different take! I like the romance of old museums, the Pitt-Rivers and the Horniman are two of my favourites because of the stories under the dust. I'll have to think about the removal of death making things lifeless. It's an interesting idea.

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

We seem to live very sterile lives these days (even more so than when I was growing up,let alone a few centuries ago).

The philosopher Baudrillard theorised that we are increasingly living in 'simulations' of reality rather than reality itself. The idea of virtual worlds online is an obvious example-but he includes 'Disney Land' experiences, artificial food/products, the preservation of valuable originals by replacing them on display with copies etc. The way we get a lot of experience of things second hand through the media would also fit with his theories. How many of us have actually seen death close up in the west, and how often? We are far more removed from it than ever before...and you cannot (as much as we might wish) separate death from life. Death is intrinsic to life. Hide it and a part of life itself is gone. Combine a removal of death (or its visibility) with increasing simulations of reality and you have a hollow plastic version of life, stripped of all its essential qualities. It is no longer a visceral experience.

When museums do this they cease to teach us anything truly meaningful about the experience of life, they loose their grounding and their historicity becomes virtual and plastic. They in effect cease to be museums and become playgrounds. I think the changes made to so many museums in the last few decades are a terrible crime in that they have blindly and unknowingly denied their proper function and replaced it with simulation. They are failing to do their job at the most fundamental and basic level and are trying to do what we have books, films and dvds for...

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. I think you are very right in that we are divorced from death and life in the same moment of sundering and such sanitisation is not necessarily healthy.

Specifically relating to museums, there is a romance to old dust and memory...but children(people?)will learn more in a playground than in a cemetary. Simulation attempts to create empathy;how do you feel now? This is how they felt...and I think that has a very important function. History is not dead, though death is a part of it, and nature is very much about life with death being only part of the cycle. How better to understand that than to live it, just for a moment or so?

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

Its a fair point about children learning (and adults) - but thats only a fraction of any museums function and I feel they have got the balance wrong with it these days. Its fine to have some interactivity with exhibits, but its actually getting damn hard to find the exhibits!

Its increasingly all about interacting with multimedia displays so the exhibit is no longer the actual artifact, but a copy, or worse still an image of the artifact. I would have thought there is an argument for the creation of interactive learning centres, but these are not museums, whose main remit is the preservation and display of the artifacts themselves.

As an example- the Tutankhamen exhibition has to tour because the artifacts are actual, physical objects that are unique. You can only see them at the museum that holds them or when they are loaned out to other museums for display. You could, however, create an interactive 'mummy' exhibit about Tutankhamen and have it replicated in interactive learning centres around the world. So why have the actual exhibits tour? Because the artifacts themselves have a presence and power, and you can observe them without the process being edited by an interactive designer. People queue not to play with them, but to be in their presence because artifacts have a reality of their own, and you can learn from that.

Surely history IS almost completely dead. Unless it is contemporary history about living memory it is 100% about the dead. We can play pretend and 'bring them to life' from time to time to time, but the originals are past and we can only communicate with them authentically through 'relics' and artifacts they have left behind. 'Living' history is simulation. I am not arguing that we should not have living history simulations-I like them and they have great value. But would it be right to take a castle and deny people access to it, forcing them to go see a new version you built down the road for living history with people in period costume? (Famous cave paintings in France have done just that-you can't see the real thing anymore).
Museums are opportunities to be in the presence of the relics of the past surely? Now there's nothing wrong with having theme days in a castle, playing a bit with display cases in a museum by having interactivity adjacent to them, but some museums are increasingly replacing the original artifacts on display with virtual experiences and locking the original items in a vault. Maybe I would feel better about it all if museums got grants to build annexes for learning centres-that would be great.

Besides, you could create a single interactive learning centre in every city (maybe even every town) in the world if you had the money and will for it, which would be great as a learning opportunity. They would not actually have to be connected to any museums at all except to gain media resources for the interactive exhibits and some expertise. I don't think the museums which have a legitimate activity with the actual artifacts of the past should be taking up significant amounts of space that was once used for this to host virtual exhibits that could be seen anywhere.

Its perhaps worth taking into account that our view of the past and death, of tradition and history is very different these days, and perhaps not in a good way- most people are scared of it, or removed from it, when in the past they were intimate with it. Roman families had the spirits of their ancestors as protectors, medieval tombs showed effigies of the departed crawling maggots. More recently you have Victorian photographs of dead children. Most people find these hard to relate to- my feeling is that this is almost 100% because we live in simulations not reality. It is a part of a spiritual death we are now facing- in denying death we are becoming undead.

[sixtine.livejournal.com]

Squeee. I had heard about it on R4 and we've been planning a sekrit (don't tell the relatives) London trip for, oooh, a millenium. We will definitely make it before mid Aug now.

[smokingboot.livejournal.com]

Well worth it. I'm going to go back, maybe this afternoon or something...if I can haul myself out of my jimjams!