Two-faced death ring
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: 17th century, death, face, gold, history, jewelry, memento mori, museum, ring, skull, unsettling
Category Archives: Museums
Tipu’s Tiger
Tipu’s (or Tippoo’s) Tiger is a life-sized wooden mechanical organ made around 1793, depicting a tiger mauling a man in European clothing. When the crank is turned, a hidden mechanism causes the man’s arm to goes up and down, and plays his wails of agony along the growls of the tiger. Under a flap on the tiger’s body there is also a small pipe organ, which can play 18 notes.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: animal, art, automaton, colonialism, figurine, grotesque, history, india, music, sculpture, tiger
Children not looking at modern art
Categories: Contemporary Art, history, Ideas, Museums • Tags: art, children, humor, imagination, museum, photography
Abandoned suitcases of insane asylum patients
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: collection, history, institution, museum, nostalgia, outsider art, suitcase
Wax figures after the fire
I’m so unsettled and captivated by this incredible photograph of wax figures burnt and melted after the massive 1925 fire that destroyed Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. I think wax models alone are already pretty creepy, but I don’t think even the Chamber of Horrors can touch the pathos of this unintentionally gruesome scene. With missing heads and appendages, charred skin and clothing in disarray, the uncanny wax models truly look like the causalities of some great trauma. I’ve […]
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: body, figurine, museum, sculpture, unsettling, wax
A cluster of rats
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: japan, museum, netsuke, rat, sculpture, unsettling
Ridiculously photogenic New Zealand criminal
Categories: history, Museums • Tags: criminal, daniel lohill, daniel tohill, humor, mug shot, museum, new zealand, nostalgia, photography, time, victorian era
Cleaning the elephant skin
My last post on the inflatable skins in James Lomax’s Untitled (Me and My Friend) (2011) reminded me of this ridiculously interesting series of photographs from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. Taken between 1933-1935 by Thane L. Bierwert, they show museum staff engaged in the task of cleaning and re-mounting the skin of an elephant for display. As well as offering a great (and I suspect rare) behind-the-scenes glance of a 1930s natural history museum, that […]
Categories: history, Museums • Tags: elephant, history, museum, skin, taxidermy, unsettling
The mysterious coffins of Arthur’s Seat
I was recently in Edinburgh for the really incredible Sensualising Deformity conference, and while there I was reminded of my one of my favorite museum objects, in the National Museum of Scotland: the mysterious little coffins of Arthur’s Seat. In 1836, five boys were hunting rabbits on the north-eastern slopes of Arthur’s Seat, the main peak in the group of hills in the center of Edinburgh. In a small cave in the crags of the hill they stumbled across seventeen […]
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: archaeology, coffins, curiosities, figurine, museum, mystery, outsider art, sculpture
