Museum Houses A Bizarre Bazaar of Animals

For many, the words “natural history museum” may conjure up some fairly dry imagery: taxidermied beasts sitting tamely behind plate-glass windows, passive-aggressive signs warning patrons “please do not touch,” sterile exhibits scattered through maze-like hallways, and a gift shop by the exit to top it all off. Carlin E. Wing ’02 begs to differ with these preconceptions.

A graduate of the Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) department and a multi-disciplinary artist, Wing is currently organizing an event called Bizarre Animals at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Using the building and its exhibits as their inspiration, Wing and a team of contemporary artists will take over the Museum on the night of March 26, installing the space with a variety of multi-media “art interventions.” Billed as a night that “will transform the Harvard Museum of Natural History into a laboratory, library, exploratorium, and stage,” Bizarre Animals promises to be an event where contemporary art, natural history, and strange beasts intermingle, reinvigorating the Museum and its exhibits.

Wing, who also currently serves as a Carpenter Center Fellow, conceived Bizarre Animals as an opportunity for artists to use the Museum itself as inspiration for projects. She invited several friends—including many fellow Harvard alumni—and gave them the freedom to propose projects based on whatever interested them about the Museum.

“The central aspect of it for me was to invite artists to come and each engage in the space in a different way,” Wing says. “Each person is taking what their creative practice is outside and bringing it into the space to create a special project.”

The open-ended, site-specific nature of the event has led to the development of a variety of projects. The team that created Bizarre Animals includes twelve artists in fields ranging from performance to poetry, sound design to video installation, and everything in between. Some of the projects that resulted are as delightfully odd as the exhibits that inspired them.

One alumnus—who refers to himself as Noah Feehan/AKA ’03—will install a video performance piece titled “Steak Filter.” The piece involves cooking a chunk of steak while displaying a live video feed of the meat on a monitor next to it. Feehan uses the steak’s conductive properties as a filter for the video signal. The meat itself is used to link the live video to the monitor, and it creates patterns of interference on the display, which gradually change as the meat cooks.

Beyond professionals and alumni like Feehan, some undergraduates will also have the chance to participate in the exhibit. Prior to the event, Wing and fellow VES alumna M. Elizabeth Glynn ’03 will conduct several cooperative workshops with undergraduates in which participants will discuss methods of documentation—a topic that has interested Wing since she studied photography as a student in VES. Her plan is to explore major questions about the relationship between performance, documentation, and their role in a museum environment. The seminars will culminate with the undergraduates deciding how to document Bizarre Animals.

Wing hopes these seminars will contribute to the open-ended nature of the project. “Maybe the students will decide that they are ahistorical and think we shouldn’t do anything. Maybe they’ll decide we should live stream it. Maybe they’ll decide we should just make sketches,” Wing says. “I’m just excited to have that conversation with them.”

Certain undergraduates will also have work on display during the event. Rebecca S. Lieberman ’10, a VES concentrator, will exhibit part of her thesis: a two-hour video installation that happens to dovetail with the themes of Bizarre Animals.

The video features a re-staging of an instructional taxidermy video, but Lieberman’s version replaces the dead whitetail deer from the original with a log of driftwood. “Taxidermy is interesting in how the animal becomes a replica and a representation of itself,” Lieberman says. “In my particular video, I address the relationship between the process of taxidermy as a mode of representation and art and sculpture.” During the event, the video installation will play alongside an actual taxidermied deer, highlighting how her work comments on the “politics of display” inherent in taxidermy.

Lieberman notes that it has been encouraging to see alumni artists coming back to participate in the project. As a graduating senior hoping to pursue a career in the arts, Lieberman wants Bizarre Animals to raise awareness of the abundance of contemporary art that is created on Harvard’s campus and beyond.

“I hope that it will give people an opportunity to look at what young artists are making right now,” Lieberman says. “It’s important for people to see that there are artists in the Harvard community who make art, and there are alumni who go on and continue to make art.”

Bizarre Animals is certainly a unique event, but it looks as if it may not be the last of its kind. Wing credits much of the project’s success to the Museum of Natural History and its commitment to bringing all kinds of new, innovative programming to its patrons. Elisabeth Werby ’72, the Executive Director of the Museum of Natural History, expressed great excitement about these projects in an emailed statement.

“Good art—whether or not contemporary—can help people see the world in new ways,” she writes. “The Museum has a strong tradition of offering experiences at the nexus of art and science—from the exquisite models of botanical specimens, the Glass Flowers, to our recent photography exhibits. Bizarre Animals continues this tradition and takes it to a new level.”