Victorian Visual Culture

While the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum is only about a ten minute walk from campus, I had never been there until last month. The museum has been closed to the public since the pandemic began in 2020, but one of my professors made an appointment for our class to spend an hour there and try to write some poetry. Our visit began with an introductory video by the museum staff and curators explaining the history of the museum. Joseph Allen Skinner was a Massachusetts man who was intensely interested in collecting throughout his entire life. He assembled the collection that is currently the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum over many years, and ultimately left it to Mount Holyoke College in his will when he died in 1946. I will link to the video, which is available on the Skinner Museum’s website, below in case anyone wants to watch it for themselves.

The video attempts to preface some of what the experience of visiting the museum is like, which is wise because the museum and collections themselves are extremely unusual, and even with the added context the experience was very strange. The building itself is an old meetinghouse that was relocated to South Hadley from a different town in Massachusetts, so the ambience is very different from what one would expect from a more traditional museum; the sense was more that we really were just walking around in someone’s old house, looking at objects that often were not behind any kind of glass or barrier and to which we could get very close. 

The collection itself was composed of thousands of individual objects generally clustered together with other similar objects– all the guns were together on one set of shelves, and all the rocks from various places in the world on another set, for example. One thing that marked this museum as so different from any other museum I have explored was the general absence of information and context for the things on display. There were no placards to give any detail about the objects or even identify what they were, but some of the objects had small pink tags around them with brief labels written in what a member of the museum staff believed to be Joseph Skinner’s own handwriting. These were sometimes difficult to read or even to see because of their positioning, but they did often provide some identification for what we were looking at. Even in the instances where we could tell what the objects were, though, there was still a lack of information about where those objects had come from and how they had come into the museum’s possession, which, given the nature of some of the objects, was often concerning. While the museum has apparently returned a lot of the objects that had previously been exhibited in the museum to the indigenous communities they had originated in, there is still a strongly felt presence of objects Joseph Skinner acquired through unclear means during his travels of many parts of the world, and as a viewer who has complicated feelings about museums in general even where there is more transparency about how certain pieces entered the museum, the lack of background available in the Skinner Museum was sometimes uncomfortable. 

I believe that the curators and staff of the museum are doing a good job of contextualizing and dealing with the collection as a whole, given the inherent nature of working with a group of objects that were all collected by one man and therefore are entirely subject to what his personal, and now unknowable, visions and motivations behind the collection were. In recent years, multiple artists have been brought in to work with the museum and create their own work or curatorial projects to frame and respond to it. vanessa german’s show, “The Rarest Black Woman on the Planet Earth”, was constructed in response to the Skinner Museum’s collection, and the staff member we spoke to said the museum was open and hoping to collaborate on similar projects in the future. The visual experience of the museum is somewhat eerie– the viewer enters into a space that is absolutely full of eclectic groupings of largely unlabeled items complete with multiple taxidermied animals, and there is still a wooden statue of a Native American man that stands at the door that leads into the museum. I was trying to write about a small glass case of taxidermied birds and a large animal skull that no one was able to identify, but I was later able to find out from the listing on the museum website that it was a hippopotamus. I am not sure what the future of the Skinner Museum should be, but at the moment the museum is a very strange and unique experience that is interesting as long as you maintain an awareness and concern for what you are looking at, even if there is no direct labeling to tell you to feel uncomfortable with it. The website has some helpful information and background that I wasn’t able to get at the museum itself, and it also has a virtual tour of the museum that you can navigate through if you can’t go to the museum in person!

Artist Lenka Clayton was featured in the 2021 Patricia and Edward Falkenberg Lecture, which is featured as a virtual event on the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum website. In her section of the lecture, she explained pieces from her exhibit “Comedy Plus Tragedy” and the inspiration behind the pieces. The exhibit was in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum, and featured items from the collection. She spoke alongside a slideshow of pictures of her pieces and items not directly featured in the exhibit from the Skinner Museum that inspired her. In the exhibit, the main focus was the way in which the items were displayed. For example, she had items that were invisible in some way, a meteorite hanging from the ceiling, and a row of vases/vessels arranged in height order. The arrangement of the displays in itself says something about or emphasizes certain aspects of the items. 

I found it particularly interesting how Clayton chose to play with the placement and spacing of her pieces. The placement of art and the way it interacts with the pieces around it can change the meaning and how people look at it. I am currently taking a course in 19th-century art history, in which we have discussed the style of art hanging in the Salon. That style features as many paintings as one could possibly fit on the wall; it is very crowded and busy. This style of presentation changes the way we look at art as opposed to how we view it in a spread-out format, like modern Museums and Clayton’s exhibit. The placement of Clayton’s pieces feels more deliberate as opposed to just cramming everything in that will fit.

One piece that I found really interesting was “Four Invisible Objects.” The objects were a wedding cake eaten by mice with only the box remaining, stolen diamonds with only the identification tag remaining, a flag that is too fragile to unfurl, and a cannonball that exploded with only its stand remaining. The most compelling part of this piece was how the main focus was not even present. The remainders of the objects only serve as placeholders to signify the once extant object that has since been lost to time. In talking about the inspiration behind this piece, Clayton recalled her visit to the Skinner Museum and said, “I found a lot of nothingness.” That sentence and the way she turned nothingness into somethingness really resonated with me. 

Another piece that really stood out to me was “Meteorite at its Highest Height in 50,000 Years.” Clayton hung the meteorite from the ceiling to put it back in the air 50,000 years after it crashed into the Earth. The meteorite is both suspended in air and in time. It is taken back to its fall and frozen there. The way the shadow hits the wall behind it and all the empty space below it also does something interesting. The dynamic between the object and what is not there puts all the more emphasis on the very deliberate placement. I liked that this piece encouraged me to think about space and time (though maybe I went a tad bit too existential with my train of thought). Clayton explained how she sat with and held the meteorite before she did anything with it, which I thought was a fascinating method and showed the extent of the thought she put into this piece. 

One last piece that stood out to me was “Remainder.” It was a row of vessels arranged in height order, and the vessels themselves spanned 4 continents and 400 years. Each vessel also has sand around its base, the excess of sand poured from the larger vessel before it. Clayton chose the vessels from hundreds in the Skinner collection but picked carefully to represent a range of cultures, materials, time periods, and functions. In her talk, Clayton did not go into a ton of depth on the purpose of this piece, but I enjoy it when artists allow the audience to interpret the work in different ways. I took away from this piece that no matter what, a little bit of the past always remains in the present, both in a worldwide sense and a personal sense. Cultures, society, and technology are only built off of what came before them, just as we are built off of our past experiences.

Overall, I think Lenka Clayton’s exhibit was fascinating, and the talk that went along with it provided some interesting insight into her choices. I liked how she played with placement, space, and time to create something unique and thought-evoking. One thing I don’t understand, though, is why it is called “Excerpt from ‘My Grandmother Lived to be One Hundred Years Old.’” It is an excerpt from a larger lecture, but “My Grandmother Lived to be One Hundred Years Old” is never mentioned in it, which I think makes the title a little confusing, and creates a conflict between the audience’s expectations going into it and the actual content.

“Lenka Clayton: Excerpt from ‘My Grandmother Lived to Be One Hundred Years Old.’” Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 18 Aug. 2022, artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu/virtual-engagement/lenka-clayton-excerpt-my-grandmother-lived-be-one-hundred-years-old?bc=node%2F1972.