This Article is From Jun 27, 2014

Morbid Anatomy Museum: The Dark Side Gets Its Due

Morbid Anatomy Museum: The Dark Side Gets Its Due

Some of over one million photographs owned by Dr. Stanley Burns, who collects images of medical history and what he calls "the darker side of life," in New York, June 12, 2014. Burns is a contributor to the first exhibition at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, w

New York: Most of us don't stop for death until it kindly, or unkindly, stops for us. And then there is the new Morbid Anatomy Museum, which will throw the Grim Reaper an enthusiastic welcome party when it opens its doors this weekend in Brooklyn.

There will be a ribbon-cutting on the stylish black facade, a "spirit photo booth" and traditional mourning foods, prepared from a cookbook called "Death Warmed Over." But the museum's broader mission - showcasing aspects of culture we might wish to dismiss as morbid or marginal - is deeply (if not deathly) serious, Joanna Ebenstein, its creative director and animating spirit, said recently.

"I want people to walk in and say: 'Wow, this is really interesting. Why don't we know about that? And what does it say about us today that we don't know about it?' " she said.

The nonprofit museum grew out of the Morbid Anatomy Library, Ebenstein's private collection of more than 2,000 books on medical history, death rituals, the human body and esoterica that was housed until recently in a tiny room tucked away in an alley. From that modest space, Morbid Anatomy has grown into a regular lecture series and DIY intellectual salon that brings together artists, writers, curators and passionate amateurs dedicated to what she sums up as "the things that fall through the cracks."

Now the Morbid Anatomy brand - which includes a popular blog and a just published anthology - is getting a foothold in the mainstream, with a sleek new three-story home in a former nightclub.

The refurbished building includes a library, classroom space, a gallery for temporary exhibitions and a ground-floor cafe and gift shop that may lure unsuspecting latte drinkers with no pre-existing interest in Victorian taxidermy or Renaissance anatomical models. But while the audience may change, Ebenstein said, the mission - highlighting the obscure, the forgotten and the strangely beautiful - has not.

Those adjectives apply to the opening exhibition, "The Art of Mourning," which features more than 90 objects - memorial photographs, Victorian hair art, mourning china, death masks - that might once have been displayed in any respectable parlor, mounted in a style that infuses familiar gallery conventions (white walls, explanatory labels) with the spirit of the old cabinets of curiosity.

In advance of the opening, we visited the private domains of three collectors - all contributors to this first exhibition - whose approach to the sometimes surprising objects of their obsession ranges from the scientific to the poetic to the practical.

"Private collections sometimes speak in a way that museums can't," Ebenstein said. "Part of the fun of curating is getting to go into people's collections to see what they have."

The Man of Forgotten Science

The Burns Archive may be one of the country's most important private photography collections, but at its careworn 19-room brownstone headquarters in Manhattan, the aesthetic is more "Hoarders" than George Eastman House.

More than 1 million images of medical history and what the archive's creator, Dr. Stanley Burns, calls "the darker side of life" make up the collection. They are mostly stored here - stuffed in drawers, piled in closets and hung on every wall, including in the bathroom.

"This is our psychiatry collection," Burns said on a recent morning, flicking on the light in a lavatory stacked with boxes and folders of rare images, before pulling back the door to reveal a surprise: a never-published 1895 photograph of a black child playing a mandolin on a branch next to a highly symbolic black bird. "This is the best black picture you'll see anywhere," he said with a bit of Barnum-esque bluster. "It was a Brooklyn photographer's protest against the Jim Crow laws. One of a kind."

Burns' "museion," as his business card puts it - a term, derived from Greek, for "a place people come to get stimulated," he explained - is normally accessible only to researchers and to the ophthalmology patients he sees one day a week.

"They love it," he said, mentioning a socially prominent New Yorker who "came for 15 minutes and stayed for six hours," wending her way from the New York history photos hung outside his garden-level waiting room, past a wall of rare early surgery photos in the parlor, and up to the third-floor private living room wallpapered with framed daguerreotype portraits.

But occasionally there are salons and talks, as well as changes to the selection of 750 or so images exhibited on the walls.

"We are our own mini-institution," he said.

Burns, a consultant on the Cinemax historical hospital drama "The Knick" (airing in August), traces his scholarly interest in medical photography to the mid-1970s, when he came across an 1847 daguerreotype of a man in Caracas with an enormous tumor on his jaw, only not the kind identified in the caption.

"I was fascinated by that," he said. "Photos often tell a different story."

Over the years, the collection expanded to include subjects like African-American history, Judaica and criminology. Burns' more than 40 books include "Sleeping Beauty," his pathbreaking 1990 study of 19th-century memorial photography, a once widespread genre that had been all but forgotten. More volumes are on the way: one on the forgotten (to Americans at least) 1939 clash between Japan and Russia at Nomonhan, another on the history of gas masks. And then there are the images that don't (yet) fit into any story, like the 1897 group portrait of the engineer corps for the unbuilt Nicaragua Canal that hangs in his waiting room.

"I'm interested in photos of things that never happened, the lost aspects of history we want to shove under the rug," he said.

In that, he sees a kinship with Morbid Anatomy, which will include more than 80 memorial photographs, paintings and cartes de visite from the Burns Archive in its opening show.

"Just as I filled a niche, Joanna has filled a niche," he said, before pausing over an oil mourning portrait of a child holding a telltale bunch of forget-me-nots that will be shown in Brooklyn.

"Is it morbid?" he asked. "It's a way of looking at life."

Beauty's Curator

Evan Michelson, an owner of Obscura Antiques and Oddities in Manhattan ... and Morbid Anatomy's scholar in residence, has a favorite quotation from Emily Dickinson: "Nature is a haunted house - but Art - a house that tries to be haunted."

Michelson's own Second Empire Victorian in Plainfield, New Jersey, is full of beautiful dead things, but its most transfixing ghosts were never alive to begin with: a bevy of early-20th-century department store wax mannequins that stand in several rooms, looking out with uncannily lifelike gazes.

"They make good company if you know they are there," she said on a recent afternoon. "But in the middle of the night, they can freeze your blood."

Michelson says she was an introverted, bookish kid who became "totally obsessed" with early architecture and ecclesiastical objects on trips to Europe, collecting vintage photographs of the catacombs of Palermo and other macabre souvenirs. After knocking around New York as a musician and performance artist, she started working in antiques, opening Obscura with Mike Zohn in 2001.

One day, a mutual friend brought in Ebenstein, and she recognized a kindred spirit whose interest in taxidermy, medical antiques and other esoterica ran deeper than décor.

"We share this idea of outsider scholarship," Michelson said. "It's about respecting the rigors of real scholarship but taking heavy ideas and translating them."

To walk through the house with Michelson (who is also a co-host of the Science Channel reality show "Oddities") is to be treated to casual learned asides on the history of cabinets of curiosity, the kinds of wire used in Victorian taxidermy and the psychological roots of the urge to preserve organic matter under glass.

"Only humans do this," she said. "It's like we've fallen out of time. We have this desire to hang onto things."

Michelson's house is full of objects she couldn't bear to part with. In her study, there are dark wood cabinets filled with poetic juxtapositions: a handmade 1860s scrapbook filled with locks of hair near a mounted preserved jellyfish; the ear bone of a whale not far from an early-20th-century wax medical model labeled "Tuberculosis cutis verrucosa upon the hand of a butcher." In the parlor, she pulls down a giant papier-mache snail made by the great 19th-century French anatomical model-maker Dr. Louis Auzoux and starts unpacking its Rubik's cube of interior chambers.

"They don't teach it this way anymore," she said. "But it's so beautiful."

There's also lots of nonvegetarian taxidermy, as well as some eerie human specimens, like a 19th-century fetal skeleton, articulated using its own connective tissues - weaving metal through the delicate bones would break them, she explained - that stands under a bell jar in the middle of the parlor table, an oddly touching purple ribbon tied around its neck.

Michelson bought the 19th-century specimen from the estate of a doctor in the South, who had kept it in a general store display case in his office. "It was pretty sad," she said. "I gave it a better home."

Cabinets of curiosity, she explained, flourished in the Renaissance as the domain of learned gentlemen, but with the advance of science, the aesthetic migrated to the craftsier, domestic sphere. Her collection includes plenty of 19th-century women's handiwork, like a plate of funereal wax pastries and fruit with carefully painted bruises.

"The amount of time women put into doing this because they didn't have anything else to do. ...," Michelson said. "It's a very strange thing."

The Morbid Maker

Karen Bachmann's cluttered living room in Brooklyn looks like that of any other family with young children - until you notice the skeleton of a human foot splayed on one wall.

"I used to wear it in my hair in art school," Bachmann explained on a recent morning. "I would pile my hair up on my head and bend the foot into a clip."

Bachmann, an independent jeweler who teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Pratt Institute, no longer wears the foot, but she still does unorthodox things with hair, or other people's, at least. She is an expert on hairwork, a once wildly popular 19th-century home art - the Paris Exposition of 1855 featured a life-size portrait of Queen Victoria made entirely of human hair - that had all but disappeared by the 1920s.

As a student at Pratt, Bachmann made necklaces from chicken hearts and sculptures featuring animal organs in plastic bags cinched with corsets.

"One professor called my work grotesque," she recalled. "I was offended but then decided to take it as a compliment. Besides, I'm pretty sure I'm the only student of hers who ever got a job at Tiffany."

Bachmann first encountered Morbid Anatomy when she was researching her master's thesis, "Hairy Secrets: Human Relic as Memory Object in Victorian Mourning Jewelry," and found a home. So far, she has given four lectures there, including one on chastity belts.

"They've always interested me as a jeweler," she said. "Where else would I get invited to talk about them?"

The opening exhibition will include eight pieces from her collection, including a hairwork rosary and an 1850s shadowbox containing a Madonna surrounded by a memorial wreath woven from the locks of someone's dearly departed. Bachmann, who taught herself hairwork techniques like the Prince of Wales feather and the wheat sheaf (symbolizing life cut short) from 19th-century manuals, also makes new hair jewelry.

Current commissions include a pair of wedding bands incorporating the couple's entwined locks. (She has also done projects using cat hair and eyelashes.) And she's designing an object for Morbid Anatomy's permanent collection: a brass reliquary in honor of the first of the museum's monthly visiting scholars, the (still living) British medical historian Richard Barnett. The reliquary will include clippings of his hair and some cartilage from an old knee surgery, as well as gauze from a recent emergency appendectomy.

"Everyone is supposed to leave part of themselves behind," Bachmann said. "He just left a little bit extra."
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
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