The saddest thing about art museums is that they don't let you interact with any of the objects. That being said, if you decided to go and start touching things at your local art museum, I might come careening out of nowhere screaming "get your grubby paws away from the artifacts!!!!" and tackle you. Just putting it out there.
There's really something special about being able to handle several-thousand-year-old Mycenaean pottery (in a safe environment, with clean hands). "Well, go ahead and look at the wheel marks," you say? Well, as I'm feeling up the pottery's wheel marks (small ridges that run horizontally around the piece as a result of being made on a wheel), it's impossible not to think about how those wheel marks were made by someone's hands. Someone's ancient hands- and now I'm touching it- it's like being physically able to touch the past (the real past, as opposed to that practically-yesterday colonial nonsense you can go traipsing through around here).
Now, when it comes to touching things touched by other people (railings, elevator buttons, door handles), I'm not super keen on sharing germs. But before you go running for the hand sanitizer, you have to realize that there's no comparison between handling regular things in our everyday environment, and say, Mycenaean pottery, manuscripts, and medieval monastery capitals. For one thing, you probably don't have the opportunity to get at these things every day. But if you ever do have the change- don't pass it up, because when it comes to art/material culture, "you gotta touch it to love it!"
"Someone's ancient hands" --> you know they weren't ancient hands when they were making it. They were modern hands.
ReplyDeleteLexi, I really like this point, maybe especially because I work in an archives handling old things (not "Mycenaean pottery old", though!) and know what you mean about the connection between me and the person who originally held it, whether we're talking a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt, a photograph of a biplane crashed in a field and surrounded by a group of smiling Russian aviators in 1916, or a story a 12 year old wrote about a shipwreck off the coast of the reservation where her father was the Indian agent. I like your blog, and hope you'll keep it up!
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