Cabinets of Curiosities: How Disability was kept in a box

Cabinets of Curiosities:

 How Disability was kept in a box

         
             Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder is a work that explores the meanings that we attach to museums and the objects that make them up. In this book, Lawrence Weschler explores the fascinating place that is Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, which has been described in magazines like Smithsonian Magazine as having a “sense of familiarity – provided by the careful presentation, the informative text, the low lighting, the thrill of discovery – yet there’s something wholly different there… It is comforting and unsettling at the same time.” This strange museum is a source of wonder and puzzlement, as one simultaneously is induced to what I felt was irrational interest in exhibits such as a horn of a woman named Mary Davis. The rational part of my mind, however, said that this was a hoax, and the more I read in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder I was sure that this work was supposed to be a caution against trusting any old museum and the need for strong academic review of objects. But as time went on, I realized it was in many ways the opposite.

                Instead of a caution against small museums and the necessity of academic review, what Weschler manages to capture about the Museum of Jurassic Technology is its dual nature of strangeness and wonder, its dual nature of careful labeling and tentative grasp of facts, and its dual nature of both being serious and absurd. Coming out of the book, it seemed like it would be important to try and re-evaluate what I value in a museum.               

               Looking around on various small museum websites, I stumbled across an exhibition that took place last year in the United Kingdom created through a program called “Stories of Different Kind” through the Research Centre for Museums & Galleries and various museums in the United Kingdom and even the Smithsonian in the United States. Entitled “Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability was kept in a box,” this exhibit was presented by Mat Fraser, an actor, artist, and activist for disability rights and related causes.

                Fraser and his colleagues used their access to numerous collections at various museums to try and create a new narrative on how disability is perceived by the general public as well as how it is portrayed in museums. Mat Fraser himself is the personification of the type of change sought by this effort, a man born with Phocomelia, a very rare birth defect which affects the formation of limbs, which in Fraser’s case affected the growth and length of his arms. However, Fraser is the sort of militant personality that has turned him into an activist and force for the voice of people with so-called disabilities. As he says in his presentation, the way in which people view people with disabilities, and the way in which museums present disabilities and disability history comes down to a few ways, two of which Fraser finds rather offensive and demeaning. The first kind which he calls the medical model of disability presents people with disabilities as objects of pity and in a medical sense objects that need to be fixed and made normal. The second which he calls the charity model of disability is that any disabled person is in need of charity and that disabled people are represented as brave and admirable solely because they live with their disabilities. Instead he prefers a social model where things like equal access are emphasized such as wheel chair ramps, and more importantly equal representation in both the workplace and in the media. For example, Fraser notes that in an exhibit on education he’d like to see a man with one arm as the teacher, something that one doesn’t see almost ever today. Most of all, he wants disabled people to be treated as whole people, not people with something wrong with them.

                Fraser’s presentation takes items from various collections, and then he comments on the labels attached to the items or their history, often with humor and sarcasm. Many items feature personal narratives of disabled people and their experiences. Notably Fraser intersperses his presentation of items with ear piercing rock music and even a rap, giving his presentation a kind of unorthodox yet appealing kind of air. Fraser was able to convey his anger and frustration with the state of the understanding of disability in our society, yet he was also able to bring humor and hope for the future. Like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Fraser seems to encourage questioning of museums and their objects. In an interview, he states that “I was always taught to question what I was told… what else is in the story of this artifact what I am being shown… all these questions open up.”

                Both Fraser and Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder got me thinking about the museum we recently attended, the Museum of disAbility History, and how it portrays the many artifacts and tells the narrative of disabled peoples. Looking back with the mindset of Fraser, to me at least, it seems that the actual voice of the disabled people themselves was not heard in the exhibits of the museum. There was many wonderful tools used by disabled peoples, boards telling the history of doctors and hospitals, and examples of media portrayal of people with disabilities, but I can’t recall very many times in which the words of the disabled people were heard on how they felt that they were being treated. Their views on their own disabilities, their surroundings, their media portrayals, these were all absent. And thinking about the Weschler book, I can’t help but feel a there was a lack of wonder invoked by many of the exhibits. While they were interesting and well presented, to me at least it seemed very straightforward and scientific in a way, and lacked any sense of intrigue. Perhaps it is just me, and it probably is for the best that their exhibits be careful with a delicate topic like disability, but one wonders if there could be a way to apply some of the lessons of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder to such a museum.

                I’ll leave you with two videos of the Cabinet of Curiosities presentation.  The first is a short 3 minute clip from one of the presentations, while the other is just over an hour long and is the entire presentation. I encourage you if you have the time to watch the entire thing, but between the interview and the short clip I think the gist of the presentation is fairly well represented. I hope that I have brought some of the ideas of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder and the more general way in which objects are presented to the surface and change the way in which we approach narrative in a museum setting. 

Don't worry, the audio starts back up around 1:15 in.

            The second video I have been unable to find an easy way to get at on any video hosting site, so just go to this article and scroll halfway down, and watch it here.