{"id":4035,"date":"2012-10-06T23:05:24","date_gmt":"2012-10-06T21:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.astroblastro.com\/?p=4035"},"modified":"2012-10-06T23:05:24","modified_gmt":"2012-10-06T21:05:24","slug":"masks-of-the-history-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/?p=4035","title":{"rendered":"Masks of the History Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I was still in New York I had the pleasure of running through the American\u00a0Natural\u00a0History Museum looking at some of the beautiful masks tucked away in their collections. It’s an\u00a0old\u00a0fashioned\u00a0museum in a lot of ways, and masks of the are displayed with\u00a0almost no context, like butterflies on a\u00a0pin-board. In one particularly bad display of\u00a0Pacific Island masks one card\u00a0read, “New Ireland.” Well,\u00a0<\/em>I thought, there is a New Ireland.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

t<\/p>\n

Today the low pile carpet and oak and glass\u00a0cabinets make the\u00a0Hall of the Northwest Coast Indians<\/a>\u00a0pretty shabby and unwelcoming but in his book The Way of the Masks, Claude\u00a0Levi-Strauss described his\u00a0experience\u00a0of the hall with the first stanza of Charles Baudelaire’s poem Correspondences:<\/p>\n

\n

Nature is a temple in which living pillars
\nSometimes give voice to confused words;
\nMan passes there through forests of symbols
\nWhich look at him with understanding eyes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Taken as objects behind glass the masks can seem meaningless, crude and lifeless. Their cards are unhelpful to the point of\u00a0silliness. They all seem to read along the lines of: wooden mask, shaman’s mask, a mask is a pretend face etc. But with a little imagination and\u00a0curiosity they start to come alive. Piercing stares, flapping, lolling\u00a0tongues. Some even have\u00a0mechanisms–hinges and pulleys–that can tear apart one face to reveal a face\u00a0underneath. Not to mention the human bodies that must have played these masks, breathing through them and embodying every\u00a0distorted and\u00a0extreme detail. \u00a0Whoo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I was still in New York I had the pleasure of running through the American\u00a0Natural\u00a0History Museum looking at some of the beautiful masks tucked away in their collections. It’s an\u00a0old\u00a0fashioned\u00a0museum in a lot of ways, and masks of the are displayed with\u00a0almost no context, like butterflies on a\u00a0pin-board. In one particularly bad display of\u00a0Pacific…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,94],"tags":[163,404,363],"class_list":["post-4035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-journal","category-theatre-artists","tag-books","tag-mask","tag-new-york"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4035"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4040,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions\/4040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}