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Michigan Garden & Detroit’s “Amusement King”

April 4, 2010 in History | 2 comments

menagerie

The public are respectfully informed that the Garden continues open to visitors. The Museum, consisting of some of the finest specimens of Ornithology, Minerals, Coins, natural and artificial curiosities, and a Grand Cosmorama occupying one building of the Garden, another containing thirty seven wax figures of some of the most interesting characters. The Garden will be illuminated every fair evening and a band of music will heighten the enjoyment of a walk through upwards of three thousand feet of promenade walk.

Refreshments as usual. The Baths are likewise in order for company.

Aug 19., 1840

(From Silas Farmer’s History of Detroit and Michigan, 1884. Unrelated illustration from the Library of Congress.)

David McKinstry came to Detroit from Hudson, New York in 1815 with his wife and four children. He didn’t have any money or a bankable trade, but he was a hard worker and an apparently ambitious guy. He joined the fire department, was soon appointed inspector of the port, and eventually attracted the attention of Lewis Cass, who placed him as commissioner on several territorial projects, including the Saginaw Road and the establishment of a county seat. I suppose in a sloppy harbor settlement of a few thousand people, it might not be too hard to get your name out there. Nonetheless, David McKinstry made his name. He served as a contractor on the county court house, established a ferry across the river (operated by French ponies, somehow) and was elected alderman in 1824.

But besides his generally industrious city- and state-building endeavors, McKinstry busied himself with an entertainment empire that must have been a huge spectacle at the time: the Michigan Garden, with its accompanying theater, circus, menagerie and museum of curiosities. (It may have been the city’s first “museum” proper; it opened in 1834.)

David McKinstry came to my attention via History of Detroit for Young People, which I just checked out of the library again. His collection of bathtubs, novel at the time, is really what started this whole inquiry:

The earliest tub in the United States was built in 1842, in a house in Cincinnati. It was a large and expensive arrangement in a mahogany case and its owner showed it to his guests at a Christmas party. He invited them to try it out, and several men did so. The newspapers went after him and said we were a simple republican people and that we ought to be ashamed to imitate the foolish luxuries of Europe.

… While Cincinnati was proudly boasting about her new stationary bathtubs, Major David C. McKinstry, a prominent Detroiter, not to be outdone, in the early forties put a number of wooden tubs in a small building facing his amusement park … One could take a bath and have a band concert near at hand, while the clatter of dishes, the cries of the animals in the little zoo, and the chatter of merrymakers in the park echoed pleasantly through the thin walls. You would not mind a bath with such a happy setting, would you?

David McKinstry’s museum and most of its collection was destroyed by a fire in 1842. Oh, and his son Justus McKinstry was a controversial Civil War general who may or may not be responsible for the phrase “pork barrel spending.” A lot more information about the McKinstry family is available in Rogue, a biography of the General, here.

justus mckinstry

Now I’m kind of excited about early circuses, museums and public gardens. If you know about any good ones, why are you keeping it to yourself?

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Richard Barnes: Museums, mortality and eternal return

October 6, 2009 in Art, Culture | No comments

On Sunday we went to Richard Barnes’s lecture on Animal Logic, his installation at the Cranbrook Institute of Science (part of the Artology series, a collaboration presenting “visual and experiential examples of the ways in which art and science frequently parallel or complement each other,” which will hold over creative-types while the Cranbrook Art Museum is closed for renovations).

The photographer gave a comprehensive introduction to his life as a photographer — working on assignment, documenting archeological excavations for universities and museums — and as an installation artist. His work, at its most basic, is about objects in space: buildings (like the Unabomber’s cabin, a series that is not on display in this exhibition but which Barnes discussed extensively in his lecture), tools, fetishized objects of trades and professions, the body as object and objects on display. There’s a sculptural element to this work — something formal.

exhibit a

But there’s also something intensely interrogatory at the heart of his work; in the Unabomber series, Barnes explores the building on trial, the building as an object of interrogation. And in a series on the excavation of the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco — built over a Gold Rush-era cemetary — Barnes explores what goes inside of museums and what stays outside (or underneath) them and questions the authority of the museum in preserving, displaying and creating our past.

legion of honor

(I’m reminded of a recent conversation about the British Museum, which a friend described as hilarious, and how the artifacts, although they should probably be returned to the nations they were looted from, are in the British Musuem to stay, and unintentionally create a shadow museum — a permanent exhibition on the history of British colonialism. But that’s another blog.)

Animal Logic is about museums, too — specifically, natural history museums — and what goes on underneath them, in this case in a more figurative sense, as the artist explores museum objects (mostly taxidermy) in transition, or in storage. The museum is a theater, and Barnes allows us to go backstage with him to see the rigging.

animal logic

The exhibition is like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities: disarticulated skulls, bird nests made out of trash, beheaded mallards, tiny stuffed parakeets so bright they look like they’ve been painted, installed on their backs with their skinny legs in the air. (Further reading on Animal Logic should include the New York Times’ piece on “New Antiquarians” and the Morbid Anatomy blog and the artwork of Cassie Smith.)

It’s a critical survey of the way we see nature from inside an institution, but with the incorporation of “Murmur,” a 2007 multimedia installation about starling migration in Rome, the exhibition takes on a layer of graveyard meditation, too: the defiance of death through the eternity of taxidermy (hints of humanity’s romance with ancient Egypt, and Barnes worked there on a dig with Yale); the creepy liveliness of a mounted stag’s head; the second death of a stuffed specimen taken off display; with the starlings, aspirations of eternal return.

New photographs and specimens for the exhibition were taken behind-the-scenes from Cranbrook’s extensive ornithology collection, and it’s amazing to go upstairs after spending some time with Animal Logic and see the Science Institute dazzlingly refreshed. Richard Barnes makes art from artifact; upstairs in the science museum, the artifacts on display— dinosaur bones, stuffed peacocks, pinned butterflies—look curiously like art.

bugs and butterflies

Barnes also has corresponding exhibitions at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (through December) and Uof M’s Institute of Humanities (through October 30). For another perspective on photography, the Detroit Institute of Arts hosts a comprehensive study of Richard Avedon’s fashion photography through January 17. If objects in space are more your style, Breeding Ground continues at the Museum of New Art through November 21.

Animal Logic runs through January 3. Next up in the Artology series, Cape Farewell (hint: it’s about climate change. Fun!) opens January 13.

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