Divers Memories
at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford,1st October to 31st December1994

I pass under the airy, skeletal vault of the Natural History Museum, Oxford, past the blue coelacanth, and a couple of steps lead down into a dim, cluttered foyer. A notice by the door offers audio-guides narrated by David Attenborough or Brian Rix. Pondering this choice I slip through the gift shop, and without warning, as if I had pressed a secret catch, find myself tumbled into the midst of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

The first impression is of a hanging garden of artifacts: carved, lashed, stitched, stretched; timber, leather, canvas, hide, metal. A fully rigged dhow floats above closely ranked cabinets of dark, polished wood. To take a single step is to be engulfed in this maze. Other visitors are fleetingly glimpsed, multiplied by reflection, threading their way between the glass cases. To move is to miss something, but my eyes draw me on, drifting high and low over this endless haul of curiousity, from every part of the world. The Pitt Rivers is the Tardis of museums. Throughout all these years of curatorial anxiety to explain, justify, contextualise, entertain, interpret; against the tide of styrofoam display-boards and interactive videos, the Pitt Rivers has (by design or default?) held fast to the essential and redeeming tenet of the museum: that it be an enchanted place, where visitors may wander and wonder at a thousand-and-one strange things, before they've even found the toilet.

Around the balconies, each visible display is merely the top of a deep chest of drawers, which you can open. This time, though, I resist. Like reading the menu outside a wonderful restuarant, just scanning the labels has a delight of its own, leaves my head spinning: wooden locks; objects used as currency; pigments; drills, scissors and tongs; mummified hawks; carrying apparatus; gums, resins, waxes and varnishes; surgical instruments; easter eggs; donkey, mule, ox and horse shoes; marionettes; hoes, digging-sticks; dominoes, dice and counters; head squeezers.

Up high near the fire-arms cabinet, a board reads: Take Notice - Men Traps and Spring Guns are set on these Premises. I know: for today, I am an art detective. The sculptor Chris Dorsett, who has been working for an extended period in and with the Museum, has assembled an assault team of around thirty artists and writers. Their mission: to infiltrate the Pitt Rivers Collection and deposit a whole secret exhibition, to co-exist with, and to wickedly parody the permanent displays: a duplicitous and audacious task, comparable to parking the army of cardboard tanks on East Anglia before D-Day, or moving Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. I pause in front of the case of tribal message sticks. On top of the cabinet (an important early-warning, I later realise) a slim, notched spindle is accompanied by a long text explaining its complex use in shamanistic ceremonies, involving trances induced by 'stridulating spikes'. The object itself looks carefully wrought and entirely at home amongst its neighbours. But hmm... that typeset text contrasts oddly with the Museum's more usual, tiny, handwritten labels... THWOK! I've been ambushed (by Max Eastley and David Toop).

My art-antennae now twitching, I proceed. There's no mistaking Phyllida Barlow's lumpen wax jet, studded with airfix-kit sprues and wrapped in sellotape, squatting on an outrageous pink trellis, next to Early modes of Navigation. But maybe its a stalking-horse... Close by, in the shadows, a small wooden construction, like a cross-section through a dovecot, shelters a collection of ships in bottles; tantalisingly under-lit, each eccentrically rickety vessel bears a quixotic message. They are the work of pupils from Frideswide Middle School, and, as with a similar construction nearby that houses some suspicious but unverifiable objects, they suggest the younger participants in this project have the ability to form less troubled, and the least self-conscious partnerships with the Museum's collection. A hanging book near the latter cabin, hairily illustrated by Sarah Simblet, contains a quotation from Martin Heidegger: No matter how sharply we just look at the 'outward appearance of things', in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything 'ready to hand' [zuhanden]. If we look at things just theoretically we can get along without understanding readiness to hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one. It has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its own thingly character. I feel the philosopher is reprimanding me; trying to prise mefrom the glazed state of fascination in which the Museum holds me. The riposte is provided by Strange Territories by Elizabeth Edwards and Elizabeth Williams. In what appears to be a correspondence between two anthropologists, accompanied by photographs of rotting, disgarded shoes, they reflect: There is always something powerful about human life moved on, and the stillness of the object empowers it with nostalgia.

Upstairs there's much upheaval and rearrangment in progress.Walkways are blocked by striped road-works barriers (art?...not this time). I'm studying some drawings: The History of the Mirror - Frederick Fahn's Speculative Vainitology, when I become aware I'm being watched by a man sitting on a stool. I assess him: They look like poet's boots to me. He starts to read aloud from a Gulliver-like traveller's tale, of an encounter with an alien race. His story seems to have some connection to the hybrid objects and rusty relics displayed in the adjacent case. The Museum is getting busier: children bustle by, unconcerned, trailing balloons ('I've visited the Dinodrome') that bump and squeak between the cabinets. The reader (Jerome Fletcher) raises his voice and continues. Next to him, a technician, returning from his lunch-break, clatters up a step-ladder and begins sawing. Jerome is practically shouting now, but somehow an air of strained normality persists. I retreat to commune quietly with the shrunken heads.

On my way to the annex where the musical instruments are displayed, I meet Mark, who decides to join the hunt. He is carrying his rather traditional painting equipment, and is worried that the security guards will mistake his mahlstick for a stolen exhibit. We approach Fabian Peake's installation and clamp on the two sets of headphones in front of a blank screen (I suppress my mistrust of this form of artistic engagement in a public space: there is a fear similar to that of being trapped in conversation with a deranged stranger). I press the start-button and a mournful plink-plock of metal on glass is heard, like a diver tapping on the bathysphere window. A little later the visuals decide to catch up, and an arrangement of bright-painted glasses and knives start to dance to the sound. After a while we put down the headsets and stand back. The plink-plonk is still clearly audible, emerging from what now look like twin crustaceans. We are getting to be keen hunters now, sniffing out intervention: that pile of textile by the harpsichord looks suspect...yes: art. We hesitate in front of an apparently ordinary tin kettle, sitting amongst the curly-wurly horns and leathery, cat-gutted fiddles. The label (small, hand-written) reads: England. Whistling Kettle: The steam evaporated from boiling water sounds a series of free reeds positioned on the spout. As the kettle boils more fiercely, and the pressure of steam increases, new, higher notes are activated. Kettles are used for boiling water for afternoon tea.

Jeffrey Dennis
November 1994

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