by Michael Finger - photos by Gary Witt
ou won't be
able to admire great art at the current exhibition at the Art Museum of
the University of Memphis, but you will be able to enrich your life in many
other ways. "Skeletons in the Closet of Culture" will show you
how to oil a hog, quench a cotton-warehouse fire, defend yourself against
samurai-warrior attacks, and even give yourself a knockout dose of ether.
"Every
museum has objects in its collection that, for one reason or another, are
never put on display," says Leslie Luebbers, museum director. "A
class project this semester was to dig out some of these objects and then
show them all together."
Under the direction of student Warren Perry, nine students in the U of M's Museums in Society class approached institutions in the area and asked them to select pieces for the show. "The curatorial team asked, `Can we look in your back room?' Without exception, we were welcomed and shown and told tales about each institution's `stuff,'" writes Perry in the exhibition catalog.
The team eventually narrowed the offerings down to 25 items from 13 different museums, from as nearby as the U of M's own archives, to as far away as the Shiloh National Battlefield.
Sometimes the "skeletons" they gathered turned out to be just that. One of the most unusual pieces in the show is a real human skeleton. "We call this Pappy's skeleton, because for a while everyone thought this was Pappy Sammons," says Luebbers, referring to the Memphis restaurateur who operated such well-known eateries as Pappy's Lobster Shack and Pappy and Jimmy's. "Pappy's son and grandson insisted he was still buried, though."
But it was Pappy's skeleton -- meaning that he once owned it. The story goes that Sammons found the bones inside a lead casket when the river washed away part of the bluffs here. He displayed the relic at the Lobster Shack in Overton Square until a fire one night melted the casket, staining the bones a dark brown. Left without a home, the skeleton was donated to the U of M, which turned it over to the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, where it's been stored ever since.
There are other bones in the show -- such as a toothy polar-bear skull with a bullet hole punched through it, from the Memphis Pink Palace Museum collection -- and more odd animal parts: Pere David deer antlers from the Memphis Zoo; a walrus baculum (his three-foot-long, uh, manhood, though the accompanying card merely explains, "baculum is Latin for staff"), and even a fake shrunken head, made of goat skin and probably sold to tourists in the Amazon, from the Pink Palace.
All
that's pretty tame stuff, though, compared to a display case holding a 1608
French tome titled, L'Idolatrie Huguenotre, which is described as
a "bound anthropodermic volume" -- meaning it's been nicely bound
in human skin. "The book was written to attack the Huguenots,"
says Luebbers, "and we have speculated that the skin belonged to a
Huguenot martyr, or to a Catholic zealot who left his skin to be used as
a book trashing the Huguenots." The U of M purchased the curiosity
from Burke's Book Store in 1986, and it's been stored in the university's
Mississippi Valley Collection ever since.
One corner of the gallery is devoted to items borrowed from Rhodes College's Halliburton Collection. Halliburton, a Memphian, earned fame and fortune in the 1920s and '30s by writing about his globe-trotting travels and adventures in exotic lands. He disappeared at sea in 1938 while trying to sail a Chinese junk to San Francisco; over the years, his reputation has dwindled. The "Skeletons" exhibition includes a plaster life mask of Halliburton's face made in 1930, an autographed edition of one of his popular books, Seven League Boots, and a kitschy movie poster for a 1945 film he appeared in called India Speaks. No print of this film exists, and that's a shame, for moviegoers would see "a white girl doomed to become the bride of Buddha," "where women are treated like cattle, and cattle are treated like gods," "where 20,000 Moslems thirsted for the blood of a white intruder," and other glories of the Orient.
The more utilitarian pieces include a cast-iron hog oiler, a device that hogs rubbed against to spread oil along their backs to keep off pesky flies; a complete suit of samurai armor, crafted in Japan in the early 17th century of iron, leather, silk, and silver; cone-shaped water buckets, stacked in barrels of water and used to battle fires in cotton warehouses; and a do-it-yourself ether kit. Called the Airlene Inhaler, this British-made device was designed to ease the labor pains of women -- by knocking them out entirely. The user would strap the gadget to her wrist, press a mask over her face, and take a few whiffs. "Since the rubber face mask was attached to her hand," a card explains, "it would fall away from her face as she lost consciousness, preventing asphyxiation." You hoped.
There's more, of course, but we won't give it away here. Some of the pieces in the show -- a little cast-iron toy fire engine, for example, and a set of bark paintings from Australia -- don't seem that unusual. And visitors may be surprised at the simplicity of the displays, such as the loose bones of "Pappy" piled in a battered cardboard box. But that was part of the plan here, to have the exhibiton "look like the storage area of a museum, a `behind the scenes'" as the catalog explains it.
Some desirable pieces didn't make it into the show. According to the catalog, red tape strangled a "futuristic-looking piece of sculpture which has not been on display since Graceland opened to the public," and the curators' efforts to bring a set of fleas from Ole Miss "dressed up in little costumes, like Barbies or something" failed when the museum there advised that "the fleas are prized and do not travel."
Oh well. Maybe next year.