Engaging Smithsonian Objects through Science, History, and the Arts ed. by Mary Jo Arnoldi (review)

In the mid-1980s, I was fortunate to become a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a program then housed in the Smithsonian Castle. As I climbed the stairs to get to our second-floor offices, I was dimly aware of a poorly lit sanctuary to the left of the vestibule. A grayish sarcophagus—easy to miss in the surrounding gloom—occupied the end wall. Resembling a funerary urn in scale, it stood on a high, dark double-pedestal and was framed by a classical arch enigmatically inscribed "Smithson's Crypt."

With its colored marbles now splendidly restored and dramatically lit, it seems fitting that the founder's monument initiates a series of twenty essays examining specific collection-epitomizing objects. These range from the nineteenth-century formation of the fledgling Institution to the mementos of September 11. Richard Stamm thus examines the history of Smithson's grave marker in Genoa up to its incorporation as a "proper memorial" within the Castle. David Hunt, meanwhile, uses new forensic technologies to analyze the process of exhumation and the resulting biological remains. While providing a trove of fascinating anecdotal detail, this dual perspective, used repeatedly throughout the book, can be confusing. Certainly the reader should be expected to shoulder a certain cognitive load, but some cross-referencing, situating, and framing of an object within the larger collection is necessary.

Historical, technical, and stylistic essays are ranged side by side, demonstrating, for example, a direct link between the Smithsonian collection of decorated Stradivari to Antonio Stradivari himself and the failure of X-ray and CT scans to make a replica of an instrument because they don't take account of wood variability. Then there is historian of science and technology Bernard Finn's study of Thomas Wilfred's "light art" apparatus (from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), followed by art historian Judith Zilczer's inquiry into early-twentieth-century "color music" and its role in the development of abstract art. Or Adrienne Kaeppler's anthropological study of the objectification of Pele, the volcano goddess of Hawaii, as both gourd (in the National Museum of Natural History) and the hulu dance in tandem with petrologist Richard Fiske's inquiry into the Big Island's vulcanology. The Air and Space Museum's Huey helicopter, when considered in Roger Connor's essay, becomes an artifact of combat service and aviation development. Curator Peter Jakab—successfully breaking from this volume's general divisionist strategy—coherently documents both the manufacture of this versatile aeronautical technology and the emotions forever ingrained in the memory of every Vietnam veteran.

What does unify the book is a new and different type of wonder not rooted in the curiosities and singularities typical of the early modern period (see Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, exh. cat., Devices of Wonder. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001). Whether intentional or not, these essays belong to an emerging scholarship symbolized by the recent MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) exhibition, Explode Every Day, curated by Denise Markonish. Rather than focusing on rare items and experiences, they condition our eyes to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and that everyday events can reveal a larger reality. The reader and, hopefully, visitor is encouraged to be amazed by the marvelous in familiar phenomena: skeletal remains, mechanical and electrical apparatus, the danced poem, Bell Aircraft, the violin maker, the blacksmith (Terry Childs on the metallurgy of Central African knife-throwing and Mary Jo Arnoldi on Herbert Ward's Congo Collection). All—like the diverse museums that together make up the Smithsonian Institution—flourish within larger categories of material culture.