Page 11 - The Secret Museum
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destroy them. At the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice I saw a piece by
Duchamp in ‘the bunker’ that is very rarely put out in the light of the galleries and
lives with other fragile treasures, protected by covers which the museum nicknames
‘pyjamas’.
Sometimes it’s a question of size – there isn’t space for enormous objects in a
museum and it’s impossible to effectively display tiny, microscopic specimens. It’s
also a matter of not having enough space – there isn’t room to show everything.
Natural History museums keep between 90 and 99 per cent of their specimens – a
vast array of species collected over centuries across the Earth – as reserve
collections, behind closed doors, ready for researchers, conservation groups or
climate change specialists to delve into. Like the fish collection at the Natural
History Museum, this is where the action happens.
No matter what the subject of the museum or why each object is in a reserve
collection, everything that isn’t on display is valued in its own right and conserved
for the future. Usually you can see anything you would like to, if you ask the museum
to see it but, if you’re at all like me, perhaps you didn’t know that all of these
treasures were there. Once I realized quite how much lay unexplored away from the
public space of each museum I felt compelled to take some of these treasures that lurk
in cupboards, basements and vaults and lift them into the light and onto the pages of
this book.
The seedling of this book was fed and watered with the help of curators and
conservators at each museum: keepers of the keys to the hidden realms. Each time a
door was unlocked and a curator ushered me into the collection they knew so well I
found myself in a world of stories, lucky enough to be with the one person on Earth
who could best explain the significance of the objects that surrounded us.
I picked things intuitively, selecting those I liked or those that provoked an
emotional reaction in me. Sometimes curators suggested precious things in storage
that they would rarely display, other times the curator and I roamed freely around the
storage areas until I found something that looked interesting, and the curator and I
would then research the item’s history. If you were to write this book you would no
doubt pick totally different treasures, but these are some of the things I discovered
that I think are wonderful.
Whatever you’re into, there ought to be something here for you: take your pick –
what about a spacesuit covered in moon dust? Or maybe three pieces of Mars, kept in
storage at the Vatican Observatory? A letter opener made from the paw of Charles
Dickens’s cat? A friendship book written in by Anne Frank? Perhaps a tutu danced in
by Margot Fonteyn?
Delve in and have a look around. I hope you will find ideas, people, stories and
treasures that will fascinate and inspire you.