At the Field Museum
Chicago's Field Museum takes you back in time, through its architecture and its organization, to the 19th century and the manic attempt to document and catalogue all natural and cultural artifacts. It is quaint in its showcases of carefully labeled and numbered North American birds, Tibetan clothing, Japanese lacquer pillboxes. Today we spent the afternoon gazing, like penniless shoppers in a strange mall, through windows into another kind of life, as removed and exotic as the furriers and jewelry stores of Michigan Avenue. The big-ticket exhibition was about Machu Picchu, filled with reconstructions of stone walls, ceramic cups and bowls, textiles, murals, videos, and 3-D interactive computer explorations of the ruins. Carefully worded signs and maps recounted the building of massive stone walls and terraces with no mortar, the process of making beer from corn mash that was chewed so that it could be fermented by saliva. It's hard (but funny) to imagine the vast scale of the labor needed to keep up with the demand, considering that beer was a central element of every celebration, ritual, and economic transaction. A stuffed llama cast an amused gaze on the mob of children, grandparents, and tours, providing exhausted parents with a welcome breather the day after Christmas.
The Machu Picchu exhibit documents a culture that was highly evolved, sophisticated, and coherent, a culture where the arts were deeply embedded in everyday life, in the artifacts, utensils, weapons, cookware, clothing, a culture technologically sophisticated in its system of highways, religion, politics, and economics. As highly evolved and coherent as it was, this culture was devastated by the sheer savage violence of the Spanish conquerors. For this reason, it was humbling to shuffle from one display to another, regarding the combs, necklaces, urns, stone walls, and clothing recovered from the first excavations of Hiram Bingham's expeditions of 1911 and 1912. The civilization of the ancient Incas as well as Bingham's world of the Victorian gentleman scholar- explorer have perished as surely as the sun will set on this blighted empire. But the exhibit soberly informs us that traces of the culture of the Incas survive today high in the Andes.
In the same grave tones the museum explains in countless places that exhibits of endangered birds were accessioned many years ago, that new specimens are drawn from animals that have died in zoos, in preserves, in captivity. The earnest language of the signs is intended to comfort and reassure, but instead, it carries echoes of alarm. We are all dying, all specimens of a vanishing way of life, our household fetishes the stuff out of which the future will construct its stories about us. What are we saying about our lives, how we pass our time together, what we build and what we revere? These stuffed snow leopards, Pacific Island outrigger canoes, Tibetan prayer wheels, and dinosaur bones stand side by side with the artifacts of Jackie Kennedy's years in the White House, with the Corner Bakery where we finally sink, dizzy and drained, into window seats with our soup and paninis, the coat check room filled with furs and parkas, and the Museum Store. As the light fails and snowflakes dance and twirl through the Chicago twilight, we fall into a silent reverie.
The Machu Picchu exhibit documents a culture that was highly evolved, sophisticated, and coherent, a culture where the arts were deeply embedded in everyday life, in the artifacts, utensils, weapons, cookware, clothing, a culture technologically sophisticated in its system of highways, religion, politics, and economics. As highly evolved and coherent as it was, this culture was devastated by the sheer savage violence of the Spanish conquerors. For this reason, it was humbling to shuffle from one display to another, regarding the combs, necklaces, urns, stone walls, and clothing recovered from the first excavations of Hiram Bingham's expeditions of 1911 and 1912. The civilization of the ancient Incas as well as Bingham's world of the Victorian gentleman scholar- explorer have perished as surely as the sun will set on this blighted empire. But the exhibit soberly informs us that traces of the culture of the Incas survive today high in the Andes.
In the same grave tones the museum explains in countless places that exhibits of endangered birds were accessioned many years ago, that new specimens are drawn from animals that have died in zoos, in preserves, in captivity. The earnest language of the signs is intended to comfort and reassure, but instead, it carries echoes of alarm. We are all dying, all specimens of a vanishing way of life, our household fetishes the stuff out of which the future will construct its stories about us. What are we saying about our lives, how we pass our time together, what we build and what we revere? These stuffed snow leopards, Pacific Island outrigger canoes, Tibetan prayer wheels, and dinosaur bones stand side by side with the artifacts of Jackie Kennedy's years in the White House, with the Corner Bakery where we finally sink, dizzy and drained, into window seats with our soup and paninis, the coat check room filled with furs and parkas, and the Museum Store. As the light fails and snowflakes dance and twirl through the Chicago twilight, we fall into a silent reverie.
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