EXHIBIT 5
It was late summer the morning that we left for the Breheimsenteret and the glacier, but it was cold enough to see our breath rise like smoke in the low mountain air. We were waiting for the bus—my friends and housemates, Luke, Sam, Tom, and I—watching for it on the single blacktop road that led from the sprawling guest-house where we were living due west to the fjords and the Atlantic Ocean and due east inland toward the whitewashed glacial tips of the high Norwegian mountains.
The guys—unshaven, except Tom—were dressed warmly, in wool socks, waterproofs, boots, and fleece sweaters. My own light jacket rippled in the ocean wind. Luke and Sam sat on the edge of the road, backpacks and water bottles cast behind them onto the freshly paved walkway. Tom—blond and boyish—stood, eating a sandwich. A small pack of birds scattered as I stepped under the concrete bus stop overhang to get warm, their gray feathers sweeping off the ground, bearing against the dew-soaked air, and then taking flight.
It was Sam’s first time on the glacier; a British economics student, he was going for the views and for the climb. He’d mentioned it more than once in the weeks before, while we’d walked up and down other mountains and hikes along Norway’s western coastline, eaten meals together out on the grassy lawn, and fallen into a friendship that was fast and solid.
Luke, Tom, and I—all in our twenties and all friends for a few years—had been to this section of the glacier three or four times before, but we’d never once ventured into the museum on its edge, never studied its exhibits, spent the day in its collections, or asked what it might have to tell us.
EXHIBIT 6
“Breheimsenteret” translates in English to “center for the home of the crevasse.” It took four years after the Breheimsenteret was built until it was authorized as an official visitors’ center. Twelve years after that, in 2009, the land surrounding the center and bordering the Jostedalsbreen was declared Norway’s first national park for biodiversity, the Breheimen.
EXHIBIT 7
In 2011 a man’s coat was found at the bottom of a melted glacier in the Breheimen. The coat was made of wool and woven with a diamond twill. Scientists dated it to 300 CE, the oldest coat in Scandinavia. “Without close attention,” the Archaeological Institute of America wrote, “many of the artifacts that emerge from melting ice will be lost—decomposed or washed away—before they can be studied.”
EXHIBIT 8
Beginning in the sixteenth century, a general interest in collecting and collections was revived. Perhaps in a nod to the mouseion of classical antiquity, Renaissance Europeans began building studiolos, gallerias, and “cabinets of curiosity” right inside their homes—often adjacent to their bedrooms—in order to hold varied collections of relics, plants, cultural and archaeological finds, and other objects of interest. These cabinets quickly gained ground in the popular imagination as representing, at their best, a microcosm of the whole world but one in which the cabinetmaker could and would propose his own “natural” order.
“The cabinet of curiosities, or the Wunderkammer,” say curators of one such collection, “was designed to facilitate an encyclopedic enterprise, the aim of which was the collection and preservation of the whole of knowledge.” This knowledge first followed classical thinkers like Aristotle and Pliny the Elder but gradually began to mark its own paths. “Over time,” the curators add, “these activities began to reveal new truths in conflict with the tenets of classical doctrine. As a result, they began to undermine the established authority of the ancients, thereby paving the way for new methods of ‘scientific’ investigation.”
The most famous of the cabinets of curiosity was created and curated by a Scandinavian: the seventeenth-century Copenhagen physician Ole Worm. Royals and dignitaries came from all over Europe to see Worm’s “Collection of Curiosities” that included runic texts, taxidermied birds, human skulls, deformed fetuses, tortoise shells, dried plants, sculptures, and a huge assortment of other items housed in a couch-lined “wonder room” that Worm had built. Like many of his contemporaries, Worm not only collected but also cataloged his works into a book. Divided into the kingdoms of nature (mineral, animal, and plant), Worm’s three-edition catalog included engravings of and notes about the collection and offered his personal interpretations on certain phenomena; lemmings do not fall from the sky, for instance, Worm noted about the popular Scandinavian myth concerning the origin of these rodents, they’re blown by the wind onto the land. This book was titled Museum Wormianum.
EXHIBIT 9
“I have collected various things on my journeys abroad,” wrote Ole Worm, “and from India and other very remote places I have been brought various things: samples of soil, rocks, metals, plants, fish, birds and land-animals, that I conserve well with the goal of … being able to present my audience with the things themselves to touch with their own hands and to see with their own eyes.”
EXHIBIT 10
When I was twenty-two I cleared my schedule to visit the Chicago Art Institute every Tuesday, the day it was free for students. I had decided to study the museum week by week, to work my way through it one collection at a time.
The year before, my older brother took some of my friends and me to the institute one cold Saturday afternoon in the late fall when we were visiting him from our small university several hours north. It snowed on the car ride down, and since none of us had brought winter jackets, we borrowed old clothes from my brother and his roommates. I wore a red wool sweater that he had received for Christmas, then accidentally washed on hot. The body of the sweater was short, but the sleeves were several inches too long.
We walked that day through exhibits of Japanese textiles, medieval armor, stone and metal sculptures, and busts of Seneca, the Archangel Michael, and a lion attacking its prey. We stopped for a long time in the modern art gallery before Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte—1884. My brother and I had our photograph taken, backs to the painting, in the same position that Matthew Broderick stood in for the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, our profiles obscuring several hundred of the dots, blending in with thousands of others.
When I went to the museum on my own, a year later, I rarely made it past the two bronze lions that edge the museum’s front steps. I studied the lions in great detail, making photographs and sketches from every imaginable angle, sometimes facing the arched doors and windows of the building, sometimes looking out at Michigan Avenue and the rest of the city. I thought about the lions often, about their sculptor Edward Kemeys, and about the names that he had given them, In an Attitude of Defiance and On the Prowl. I found strangely consoling the way the tails of the lions—pointing to the museum—were bronzed-colored, though the bodies had both turned a perfect shade of oceanic green.
EXHIBIT 11
On October 8, 1871, a hot dry day, the central business district in Chicago caught on fire. Much of the city—constructed of wood—went up in flames within a few hours. The original Chicago institute—then a four-year-old studio and art gallery, the Chicago Academy of Design—burned to the ground.
For several years after the fire, the academy almost didn’t make it. Eventually, however, the academy consolidated with another failing school and, thanks to the timely Chicago placement of the World’s Fair ten years later, opened its current building, changing its name to the Art Institute of Chicago.
EXHIBIT 12
Norway has not just one but three glacier museums, all of which were built in short succession. The Bremuseum opened in 1991, the same year the Jostedalsbreen National Park was established. In the next two years the Jostedalsbreen National Park Center and then the Breheimsenteret followed.
The Bremuseum was designed by celebrated Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn to resemble a rock left behind by the glacier’s retreat. The walls are cast-concrete; there are skylights all along the top ridge of the roof, and the tunnel-like entrance is flanked by two sets of stairs, aligning exactly with the mountains as you see them fr
om the open-air second-story rotunda. There are twenty-four exhibits inside, including several elaborate models of glaciology in 1 to 30 and 1 to 50,000 scales. There are charts and photographs showing the history of the region from its formation and recurrence in various ice ages to the wedding parties and bootleggers who made its first recorded crossings. There’s even an exhibit meant to resemble a glacier meltwater channel: the mockup of the underside of a glacier. It’s painted in brilliant blues and drips real water on visitors. Grinding noises, mimicking the sounds of moving ice and stone on the bottom of the glacier, blare through a speaker inside the tunnel. Two mannequins dressed in climbing gear wait near the entrance.
The Jostedalsbreen National Park Center is what its name suggests: exhibits and information all about the park and plants and animals, maps of the glacier, and photographs of wildlife. There is a geological commons attached to the outside of the center—hundreds of different kinds of rocks, sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic, all poised on two- or four-legged metal stands—and a large botanical garden with five hundred species of wildflowers. Inside, the building is half stave hall, half stone auditorium, symbolizing, as one Norwegian writer puts it, “the encounter between the past and the future.” There are carefully labeled rocks lining glass cases along the walls and a large exhibit of taxidermied animals, including a full-sized moose that appears to be running directly from a wall of windows, toward the rest of the exhibits.
EXHIBIT 13
By that morning my friends and I were waiting for the bus for the Breheimsenteret, I’d already been to both of the other Norwegian glacier museums. A friend and I had stumbled upon the park center the summer before, after planning to get to one side of the glacier but accidentally taking the wrong boat for five hours toward the other side of the glacier, before realizing our blunder.
“I can take you to a car ferry,” the boat captain said as he walked up to us, map in hand, after hearing talk on board that some American girls had ended up on the wrong boat. “The ferry will take you to the north side of the glacier, rather than the south; I think, from there, you’ll be able to get a bus.” I agreed and thanked him, and we soon joined two other passengers on a car ferry void of cars. We got to the park center after hours that night and so camped a mile down the road, beside a small stream. In the morning our shoelaces and water bottles had frozen solid.
The day I visited the Bremuseum, a guide there told me that the museum’s slogan is “a place for curious people” and suggested three things I might find interesting: a three-hundred-degree panoramic film of the glacier and the local region, a several-hundred-year-old melting piece of glacial ice set in granite near the front of the museum, and a display about Otzi, the world’s oldest mummy, discovered on a glacier in the Alps in 1991, after the ice that had held him for hundreds of years disappeared.
I took the guide’s advice: watched the movie, touched the shrinking piece of ice, and then I stood before Otzi for a long time, comparing the plastic skeleton on one side of the exhibit—faded yellow bones, open mouth, a sunken spot in the skull for eyes—to the mannequin man on the other, dressed in furs and leather, sandy brown hair lightly touching the back of his neck.
I brought along a notebook and scrawled pages of notes. I bought a book on Norway’s glaciers, a brochure on the national park, a map—outlining, in red, the various routes to get to the glacier—and, for twenty-five kroner, a blue photocopied guide to the museum’s exhibits.
4.6 billion years ago [the first page of the guide begins], the Earth was part of an inferno of colliding asteroids …
40 million years ago, the Earth was warm and the atmosphere contained a high percentage of greenhouse gases …
20,000 years ago, at the end of the Last Ice Age, large parts of the northern hemisphere were covered by enormous glaciers …
We now travel to the year 2040. What has become of the world?
EXHIBIT 14
In 1997 Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, “The container and the contained, the art and the architecture are one thing, made for each other; nowhere else do all of the arts support and play off one another in a unified aesthetic that so fully expressed the twentieth century.” In another article, a year later, about the Scandinavian museums including the glacier museums, Huxtable described the ideal museum as “full of the promise of aesthetic and poetic power.”
EXHIBIT 15
Of the Bremuseum, famed architect Kjetil Troedal Thorsen said, in 2010, it “communicates like a poem with its surroundings.”
EXHIBIT 16
Though no one actually knows how the Chicago Fire of 1871 began, city lore argues that the fire started when Patrick and Catherine O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern in their barn, setting the neighborhood and then the city on fire.
EXHIBIT 17
The first public museum, the Ashmolean, opened at the University of Oxford in 1683. The museum’s origins are traced to a partnership between renowned English botanist John Tradescant the Younger and politician Elias Ashmole. Long interested in collections, Ashmole visited the Tradescants’ sprawling Wunderkammer of books, coins, costumes, weaponry, animals, and plants (alternately called the Ark and the Museum Tradescantianum). Ashmole was so impressed with the Tradescants’ collection that he offered to pay for and publish a detailed catalog of the museum’s contents.
Tradescant the Younger accepted and began a somewhat shaky partnership with Ashmole that ended with his 1662 will deeding his entire collection and property not to his wife but rather to his good friend, Elias Ashmole. Fifteen years later—after surviving an extended trial about whether the inheritance was “swindled” or rightly won—Ashmole added his own prints, coins, and metals to the Tradescants’ collection and offered up the newly deemed Ashmolean Museum to his alma mater, the University of Oxford, on the conditions that the collection would be housed in its own building and that the building would be open for public viewing. After six years of construction, the museum opened on Oxford’s Broad Street on May 24, 1683.
Benefiting from the eighteenth century’s quest to advance knowledge through reason and science, the public museum model quickly took hold, and a slew of museums were built—or newly opened for public viewing—around Europe and the world. In 1734 the Vatican’s Capitoline Museum opened; in 1759 the British Museum was built; in 1765 the Uffizi opened to the public and, in 1793, the Louvre.
Some people say a crisis of authority prompted the rise of the public museum; museums both accepted and civilized the lower classes, placing visitors in the role of the viewers and requiring them, as one scholar notes, to take on “the ideal spectator pose.” Museums, it seemed, offered an education about socially acceptable civic behavior by both informing and constructing a public at the same time; museums secured a belief in the centrality of evidence, interpretation, and classification. Everything is collectible, the museum’s presence seemed to suggest, everything is within our grasp.
EXHIBIT 18
Historical mythology often recounts the burnings of the mouseion, and particularly the Library of Alexandria. Though scholars don’t know if there was just one fire—said to be started by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE—or several smaller fires during the four-hundred-year period between Caesar and a decree against the institution by the pope in 391 CE, the museum’s destruction became a symbol for the shutting down of scholarship and the loss of cultural knowledge.
EXHIBIT 19
When I first began teaching, I told my students that essays were a lot like museums, that creating an essay was about gathering artifacts, about doing careful and thoughtful research on those artifacts, and about organizing them into exhibits and collections. Selection, preservation, presentation, I’d tell them, the art of finding something to say and saying it rightly. My own professor in graduate school, Beth, had asked us to study Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology as an essay, a collection of found materials; there was a tie, she suggested, between the form of th
at museum and the nonfiction we were writing.
Like my professor, I had my first classes of students look through the museum’s online displays of Russian tea rooms and dogs of the Soviet space mission, but then I sent them to traditional museums—history, science, art, and archaeology—and had them take notes, draw elaborate maps, and analyze structuring principles. As a class we visited halls of statues, photography galleries, a planetarium, a cemetery—a collection of stars, a collection of bodies, I told them—and mimicked their designs in our writing.
I wanted my students to see the essay as not only art but also science. I wanted them to have something to hold onto—a consolation, a reprieve, an architecture—when the onslaught of moments, ideas, and words left them circling, breathless.
EXHIBIT 20
The drive to the glacier involved two bus transfers and an hour-and-a-half wait in a town slightly larger than the village where we lived. When Sam, Luke, Tom, and I finally boarded the last bus, I asked the guys where they wanted to sit and they automatically pointed to the back: behind all the hikers, climbers, couple of students we knew, many that we didn’t, behind the luggage racks and the extra door and the reclined seats of the people ahead. There were already several Norwegians onboard, along with a group of twenty or so French athletes in their late teens or early twenties, wearing matching red ski suits.
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 11