The Whitworth Art Gallery was really nothing like I expected - it was much more of a modern installation museum than anything, when I was expecting more of paintings and things of that nature. The first room you walk into is full of displays of textiles, mainly all from the past 200 years, showcasing different styles from Britain, Asia, and America. The next room has an installation piece Tony Ourslef which mainly had paintings with a centerpiece of what I believe was supposed to be a talking lightbulb, although its artistic purpose was lost on me since I could barely understand what the voice was saying. Moving on from there we went upstairs, where in a large room off to the side there was another installation piece of two large projector screens of a lady filming herself walking on a highwire from one building to another; at least, that is what it supposed to be a video of; I stayed in the room for about 3 minutes and she just kept looking back and forth so I left. Back downstairs, there was another room whose dominating piece was a digital wallpaper by Valerie Sparks with images such as a mountain range in Iran, a Russian Orthodox temple, and a statue of a Hindu god. What I got out of this museum was mainly from the first room with the textiles; it had a lot of information about not only the fabrics but the meanings of the colors too, such as in Japan and China white is a mourning color, whereas most other places in the world it is a symbol of purity and goodness.
The next museum we visited was the Manchester Museum, located at the University of Manchester. The only thing I really knew about this museum is what Dr. Walker, or La'Lisa, had told us, and that is that there were live snakes there somewhere. I didn't expect there to be dead animals, though, and there were plenty of those; owls and bats and duck billed platypuses, which I expected to be a lot bigger than they were, not to mention countless insects mounted on pins. The museum was having some sort of event going on for children so there were many families there doing special family events. After looking at the first room on the floor there, I moved into the next room which was all Orient or Native American items, such as figurines, feather headdresses, and bows. From there, I moved upstairs and saw the Indian elephant skeleton, which was massive, and a child's bug and flower exhibit with cute little miniature environments for the bugs. Moving on was an Egyptian exhibit, which had a controversial opened mummy case. Mummy cases are supposed to be kept closed for the respect of the dead, but there were 2-3 open ones, and a propped up skeleton of another. I personally do not think that, save special occasions, mummies should be viewed since that is essentially the same as digging up a grave and staring at a corpse. After the Egyptian exhibit, which was going through some renovations, we went on to the next rooms which had many more stuffed animals, such as a polar bear, monkeys, and what looked like a starved lion. The rest of the exhibit was mainly stuffed birds, save the head of Ol' Billy, which is one of the longest living horses ever. There was also a skeleton of a sperm whale hanging from the ceiling. From there, we went to the vivarium, which is a "place where we keep and study live animals in conditions as close as possible to their natural environment." This, of course, is where the snakes are, as well as different frog and lizard specimens. I ended my visit there, and went back downstairs to see the T-Rex skeleton, which I had missed before. What I learned from this museum is that duck billed platypuses are much smaller than I thought, Mancunians apparently don't think it's offensive to show mummies or put sweaters on stuffed goats, and that they have quite an impressive collection for being a museum at a university. It was quite an interesting place to be, save all the screaming children who were there.
No comments:
Post a Comment