Back on Track in Richmond with...Mocha Dick and Confederate Industrial Ruins

Ok, getting Museum at Work back on track from de facto summer hiatus. After about a million different plans for first week of August, I ended up visiting my charming brother in DC, who was accommodating and delighftul enough to drive me all the way to Richmond to see this fantastic, totally rad installation at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Presenting...Tristan Lowe's Mocha Dick:

Tristin Lowe’s colossal sculpture Mocha Dick is a fifty-two-feet-long recreation of the real-life albino sperm whale that terrorized early 19th-century whaling vessels near Mocha Island in the South Pacific. Mocha Dick, described in appearance as “white as wool,” engaged in battle with numerous whaling expeditions and inspired Herman Melville’s epic Moby-Dick (1851). Lowe worked with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia to make the sculpture: a large-scale vinyl inflatable understructure sheathed in white industrial felt.


 Unbelievable. Naturally, I HAD TO GO. IT WAS SUPER WORTH IT.

I think this is a brilliant and effective museum touch:

Next up, the National Park Service Civil War Visitor Center at the site of the Tredegar Iron Works. In search of my National Park Passport stamp, I admit that I had no idea we were stumbling into the remains of the Confederacy's main iron works. Pretty creepy. I also admit that we skipped the private museum, had a lovely chat with an NPS volunteer, and then poked around the industrial remains. In addition to a partially intact waterpower system, most of the remaining infrastructure was post-Civil War era manufacturing equipment, and the Park Service has displayed a number of turbine pieces outside so visitors can explore the 19th century technology up close and personal, including:

• touching
• smelling
• peering
• taking stupid pictures
• climbing
• "whoa"-ing

All of which provided this loudmouth anti-Confederate Northerner an opportunity to make some interesting intellectual and emotional connections with this unusual site. And take a couple dumb pictures. 

My brother could have made some good connections too if he hadn't had to say, "Em, the park rangers are going to yell at us" every fifteen seconds. That no-touch stigma is hard to shake.

Putting Visitors to Work

Museum at Work? Why not put visitors to work?

One of my most memorable participatory museum experiences ever was at Mystic Seaport. It's pretty simple, they make a bunch of visitors work together to raise the sails of a 19th century ship. A staff "chanteyman" sings a work song to keep the pace. You're actually standing on the ship, doing it.

The physical novelty of my experience as a visitor served to underscore the extreme historical routine-ness of it. For me, I realized, this was a total break from my normal rhythms; for sailors 150 years ago, it was the most basic, even monotonous rhythm of their lives at sea.

It's an effective interpretive program because it's a relatively simple, immersive, authentic, and cooperative activity. Strangers rely on one another. It's dramatic. The sails are big, and real, and put up a lot of resistance against the rough rope. Mystic's interpretive staff make it clear that you have to take it seriously, too -- everyone on the line has to plant their feet properly, pay attention to the rhythm of the song to know when to pull the rope, and place hand over hand correctly as they pull.

I really didn't want to be the one to mess up. It feels like there's really something at stake. Check it out: in this video they're raising a whale boat (I think), rather than the sail, but the environment, effort, and chantey are similar enough to give an impression:

Can other museums put visitors to work in a similarly safe but powerful way?

Trying Out

Is there any historic industry more dramatic, frightening, and fascinating than whaling?

No. Proof: Moby Dick. More proof: some amazing nighttime photos from the New Bedford Whaling Museum of "trying out." That's when, after taking a whale, the whaling ship becomes a fiery 24-hour factory dedicated to cutting it up and rendering the blubber. Allow Herman Melville to evoke the scene more elegantly, with my unnecessary emphasis added:

Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shriveled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur- freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

And now, some eerie photos of this incredible, seafaring factory work.

And one close-up: