Miniature Worlds

The town library in Ness City, Kansas, was a small affair in the 1950s. I remember it in my grade school years as a stand-alone building that was standard storefront architecture of the times. The librarian was a polite and encouraging older woman. I don't remember much about the collection, but what fascinated me were the dioramas. A row of a half-dozen lighted boxes along one wall modeled scenes depicting the early days of the area, mostly illustrating native American activities and settlements. There also was one showing white settlers building a prairie frame house. I spent so much time studying them that I was warned to turn out the light switch in each.

Several decades later, in graduate school for theatre design, I was introduced to the Thorne Rooms. These are a kind of diorama plugged in, but people are mostly absent. There are 68 of them at the Art Institute of Chicago, exquisitely rendered in about 1" scale, often including lighting, depicting mostly opulent interiors of different periods and styles.

As a sometime model railroader, more interested in the art of the layout than the operation and equipment, I was fascinated by these rooms. As stage designer they became great research sources and I visited the Institute rooms several times, whenever I got to Chicago. In detail and finish they go far beyond what I produced for designs, but they always represented a far-off goal in presentational model art.

It's interesting to me to think about why these exist. For theatre purposes, the value is direct and clear. Something will be built to reflect that model, and other artists and performers create their work in harmony with it.

But the dioramas have another purpose. They reify in miniature something that may exist no longer in the modern world. They share an experience and understanding of a place and time in ways that closely resemble reality. As three-dimensional miniatures, they convey a sense of space and allow one to grasp the whole of the design in a state of perfection. So, it is not just the subject of the miniature, but also the nature of the miniature itself that can be appreciated.

None of my theatre models rose to this level of care and finish, though often the goal was there. The model is not the art, it's the idea of the art. But the process of model-making is important for making design judgements and explaining the design. I rarely finished my theatre models, once I had worked out design problems and they became sufficiently explanatory to directors and stage craftsmen.

I truly would like to return and visit those rooms again. Google them and you will be amazed. Certainly visit them if you get to Chicago.

Museums in Modern Times

Some anguish in the New England art world has been prompted by a shift in mission for the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield. I have not personally visited the museum, near the New York border. It was created in 1903 as the Museum of Natural History and Art by the head of the Crane Paper Company. In 2008 the museum opened a new 3000 square-foot exhibition space, the Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, devoted to local innovators like Hermann Melville and Cyrus Field.

The institution houses some 40,000 objects in its permanent collection, including artworks and jewelry. It is putting 40 works up for sale, including a couple well-known Norman Rockwells. Others include Calder sculptures, Hudson River School painters like Albert Bierstadt, juicy Bouguereaus, curious Calders, Federic Church landscapes and Durrie's winter scenes popularized in print form by Currier and Ives. The sale is part of a $60 million re-visioning of the museum and a shift in focus to science and natural history.

The stated goal is re-invention as more of a "learning and discovery center." The museum points to other institutions in Albany and the region with significant historical collections of American painters. The plan is drawing extensive criticism from the art museum community, as might be expected. All museums face significant pressures and crises of relevance in the digital age.

I can't help feeling that the criticism is less about the museum itself, than the fading cultural necessity of museums of great paintings. Patrons tend to invest emotionally in the works with which they are familiar. The fine points of experience in the presence of a substantial work are lost on a digital screen or a book illustration plate, and they often fail to rise above just "a nice picture." For most of America, that difference matters very little. The romantic sense of being "in the presence of genius" has lost its imperative for them.

Museums do face a problem with static life. The largest museums display only 5% of their collection at any time, mostly rotated among the best known works. Smaller museums, such as the Berkshire, tend to display more of their works. Rotation of popular and critically recognized pieces becomes more difficult. It becomes a challenge to engender a sense of the museum as something more than a static archive. Rearranging galleries and fine art lectures are limited answers.

Art, particularly visual art, has become a much different cultural product over the century past. Much of the 20th Century was characterized by sorting out the aesthetics of hand work in the age of reproduction of increasing fidelity. A century ago there was no direct reproduction, no color photography, no digital media. Art products were tangible and dimensional. They could only be understood well through direct contemplation in their physical presence. Museums were the answer.

This isn't a benediction for museums, and the Berkshire isn't the only museum facing this kind of crisis. Predictably, the organizations of museum professionals attacked the sale. They are bracing against the tide. Smaller museums will define broader missions for themselves. Today, it's about much more than pictures and sculptures.

Arthur Dirks July 28, 2017

Flea markets and Sunday closing.

For a few years after we moved to Massachusetts in the early 1980s the state was among the few remaining that restricted commercial retail activity on Sundays, historically supporting workers against exploitation. Western states largely had abandoned the practice by the 1970s. The laws did allow sales activity by individuals as private sellers, leading to thriving markets of individual sellers buying, trading and selling - usually used or secondary market merchandise. It became a thriving ancillary economy, but it was tax-evasive and understandably opposed by brick-and-mortar retail business interests. Sunday closing laws died of irrelevance in 1983, but the secondary economy that they fostered continued strong for another decade or so.

The Sunday commercial activity in closed states was yard sale plugged in. Large parking lots, old factories and vacant warehouses were repurposed for a few hours for private vendors doing business the way its been done for several thousand years. A few such enterprises continue, but their social value waned without the policies that closed almost all other shopping and restricted Sunday employment. Certainly there isn't the scale of economy those markets provided.

In populous areas there were many roadside stands and groups of vendors in larger venues, open only on Sunday when the vendors were free from their regular employment. They opened early in the morning and were packing up after lunch. Parking lots of closed shopping centers and closed factories and businesses were markets for a few hours each week. A few of the more established markets continue today, but the large populist activity has long passed.

Brimfield Antique Flea Market.

This was widespread practice in Sunday-closing states, and eventually gave rise to a thriving Memorial Day-to-Labor Day flea market and perpetual yard sale strip in local stretches from north of Boston all the way down old Route 1 to North Carolina and Florida.

When we first moved to the region from the central states in 1983, we thought the Sunday closing laws were annoyingly backward and inconvenient. You do learn quickly to plan activities and shopping around it. Without alternatives, one can learn to like it. It was a true time out, and many of those busy things of life were put on hold for the day. The laws were intended to protect workers, including retail, but the social environment evolved when everybody wanted Sunday shopping and Sunday pay. The demise of the closing laws altered the agenda of the day on Sunday for most families and the small vendor markets faded.

In moving to Massachusetts we were in on the tail end of the practice and find ourselves a bit nostalgic today for that secondary retail activity as entertainment, and as a source for interesting and somewhat unique goods. Conversations and banter with vendors often were part of the experience.

One needed not to go far. There were notable large venues, such as a defunct dog track in Taunton (which burned down in 2001), closed factories (of which we had many in the region, since razed), large parking lots of Sunday-closed businesses, as well as many residential perpetual yard sales where permitted. The Taunton market had scores of vendors on the two concourses, the services ground floor, and outdoors on the track apron and parking lot where they spread blankets. This was as close as one can get to the historic early bazaars. Vendors also typically haggled, and goods were always buyer-beware.

There also were many smaller venues of perhaps a dozen vendors. Some were categorically focused, such as jewelry and small items and others more furniture or more glassware and ceramics. These more specialized bazaars typically were open on Saturday rather than Sunday morning, and occupied old vacant factory buildings and church basements. These businesses also have dwindled to scarce.

In 1983 Massachusetts began to free up commercial Sunday retail and the markets gradually eroded to a few year-round indoor markets by the late 1990s, brief holiday markets, summer vendor fairs at local festivals, and big events like the week-long Brimfield Antique Show in central Massachusetts three times a summer. Many people now worked Sundays, and it became a regular shopping day for most others. When it comes to flea market as a market, shopping as entertainment and opportunity for unique goods, and Sunday as a non-workday, it is a sad loss.

Other fairs with used and antique vendors that travel are spaced through the season, similar to Brimfield but much smaller, and there are several one-off holiday fairs. Those holiday vendors often aren't local and the sales are almost exclusively new, artist craft, or valued antique goods.

These are quite different from the local flea markets, such as the modest one in Raynham each Sunday morning that still thrives. Once there were a half-dozen substantial markets within 20 miles: small vendors, used goods, oddball goods, "antiques," and they were worth a couple visits each year. Today, one must know about the few remaining and where to find them. They're still worth an occasional visit if the goods change, particularly if one is a collector of anything.

This is a personal lament of the kind of progress that diminishes civic life in favor of churn. We reduce our interaction by buying online. We lose the social mingling of market shoppers and vendors. We miss the opportunity to engage actively with a vendor over price. And we retreat into a world of doing our own picking and even our own scanning to evade a vacant clerk. For the most part, we just don't have time for all that.

I have no bon mot here. We rarely visit a Sunday market because the entertainment value is no longer worth the effort or the loss of a sleep-in. We don't really need things. For collecting and trading, remaining markets probably are sufficient. The ramped-up, Amazon/ebay-driven retail space competes with Walmart/Target for our consumer shopping dollar for both new and old goods. The appeal of the old, odd, unusual has faded in favor a few special things. The world has changed, and after 30 years, it probably should.

Scenemaker, 19 July 2017