On Twitter the other day, writer Geoff Manaugh posted some interior photos of the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, PA. What I saw looked like an amazingly strange, multi-storied wooden fun house, pre-industrial farm implements and unidentifiable tools tacked to the walls and ceiling. The aftermath of some poltergeist’s redecoration scheme, everything hanging in brown shadow, unseen windows letting in soft, yellowy beams of light.
For the first time in months, I wanted to go somewhere.
But why? Even before the pandemic, I’d begun to sour on museums—on all the screens and virtual hoohah they seem so eager to install;(1) on the continual crowds that make it impossible to contemplate anything for more than a few seconds. On the sense, particularly in art museums of all sizes, that your non-elite presence, or rather, the hefty entrance fee it entails, is only tolerated. On the requisite pass through the gift shop, where you can get designer handbags and jewelry whose prices start in the triple digits, but no postcards to share your enthusiasm about an artist or exhibit. To put it too broadly, I’d grown tired of participating in the ways the tastemakers fund the maintenance of their assets by graciously allowing the masses to be dazzled by them.
I can’t help but wonder whether this sort of reactionary dissatisfaction was part of what sparked the creation of the House on the Rock, what I can only describe as a subterranean hoarder’s den in southern rural Wisconsin. Although categorized by theme—doll houses, turn-of-the century American street scenes, carousels—room after dark, dust-clogged room pretty much consists of oodles of plastic crap and token-operated mechanical gadgets that may or may not be in working order. There is, for example, an orchestra on one ceiling whose members consist of ancient mannequins. Some do move arms or heads when they’re supposed to be playing their tinny symphonies—but at some point, this isn’t even funny as kitsch anymore. Your breathing grows labored, and you’re certain you’ve inhaled mold spores, and you’re so driven to get out of these cheap catacombs that you don’t even take time to sit at the truck-stop-quality restaurant somewhere in the complex’s mid-section, where local youth earn their summer wages slinging microwave pizza under unforgiving fluorescent lighting, and probably develop a case of black lung to boot.
The House on the Rock feels like an unbelievable celebration of American populism and gluttony, a logical outcome of our own particular way of managing class conflict. The snooty rich have their art? We’ve got whole acres of wonders to look at; we’ve got a model of a giant octopus and a whale and the boat it’s destroyed, and gumball-machine jewelry displays all around them! There’s no curation here; just more and more and more: a real bargain—and everyone’s welcome: come as you are!(2) The further into its depths you go, the more insight you have into just what the so-called American dream has turned into: an ability to surround yourself with as many tatty baubles as you want, possible only if you accept, and celebrate, your lot in life, and don’t start questioning whether any of it is worth it. This is all you can very likely expect if you’re not wealthy—so if you can’t change things, glorify them, revere them aggressively. Were the House on the Rock to develop a sense of self-awareness, it would turn into a reenactment of the final scene of Werner Herzog’s defeated-immigrant tale, Stroszek.(3)
Something about the Mercer photos insisted there was another way. The museum’s contents are older than anything in the House on the Rock—but these carts and tools and, yes, even a whale boat—had a purpose, were required for the long, hard haul of staying alive: for the plowing or the milking or the sewing. But the unglamorous nature of what’s displayed apparently doesn’t keep it from being presented in creative fashion; the farmhouse-meets-M. C. Escher look of Manaugh’s, and the museum’s, photographs, is what grabbed my eye in the first place.(4) I mean, it’s not every day you see wagons and chairs dangling from the ceiling—the mundane made into art, without being showcased as trendy, or its value visible only to those in the know.(5)
But something else was also at play. Unless the photo gallery was keeping them from view, there were no screens to stare at or buttons to push in sight; the artifacts themselves, naturally enough, seemed to constitute the entire attraction. That analogue approach itself may have been the focus of my longing: spending time with things that were once in practical use, being able to imagine a weightier existence, in which distractions were not only fewer; they might get you hurt or killed.(6) And then—and this might be the key—being able to place yourself in a universe in which misinformation and hatred could and did spread widely, but only as fast as your horse could carry it, or the local printing press could churn it out. Instead of the microseconds it takes today to bury us under a pile of exhausting lies and invective, at least a full twenty-hour hours would probably have had to elapse between one piece of falsehood being typed up and sent out and another being broadcast in its wake.
But then going down that nostalgic road, I realized, will only lead you back to the House on the Rock—which does have a specific “Tribute to Nostalgia” on display—and all the unpleasantries of US history it wants to hide. The pre-industrial United States, without its plumbing or electricity or vaccines, without much at all in the way of women’s rights or a view of people of color as fully human, would be no picnic. I’m glad I don’t have to pile up firewood for the winter, or clean out a stall every morning. So a simpler time is a nice thought, until you consider the realities that made it anything but simple.
Public domain image courtesy Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo, SFA008001002 via Wikimedia Commons.
I look at the Mercer photos again, and I see a sled—an image that suddenly throws me into the world of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, the tale of lovers who’ve met each other too late, or at least under the wrong circumstances. Ethan and Mattie’s fate played itself out just before the turn of the twentieth century—but their rural New England community would still have understood the horse tack and farm tools hanging on the walls and ceiling of the museum.
To these two souls who saw no way out of the intolerable predicament that kept them apart, their time was anything but simple—and so they tried to escape it, hoping to sled as fast and as forcefully as they could into something hard enough to send them on to another world. But chance often thwarts our best-laid plans; instead of going out in glory as Thelma and Louise later would, these two end up maimed and miserable, with no love left to carry them through a reality worse than the one they’d faced in the first place.
I see that sled in the photos, and I’m back to a lack of desire to go anywhere, even to this very cool-seeming museum. Here’s what I think I reached for in those images of old wooden crafts and wheels: some way of escaping this year; this pandemic; this ugly, hateful welter of factions we’ve become. Were I to visit that Pennsylvania museum today, the danger might not come so much from fellow visitors’ failure to keep their social distance or their noses inside their masks. The risk would be that I’d grab that sled off the wall and send myself sliding down the first steep embankment I could find, hoping to bust through a hedgerow into a magical grove where kind fairies would watch over my prolonged sleep, waking me up when the world had turned kinder, or at least less childishly insane. But as Ethan and Mattie remind me, it’s probably best in the end just to face up to the circumstances fate has assigned, instead of trying to get around or out of them.
I don’t know what it will mean for any of us to see the next few years through, other than the fact that they’ll (continue to) be hard for most of us. But I have to believe, or at least hope, that I’ll eventually want to go somewhere again, to be among people, to look at the leftovers of our shared past and maybe even the meaningless trinkets of our present, and feel contented just to be there.
(1) I’m continually puzzled by the ways in which we interpret “interactive” these days; how is it that looking or thinking, or touching a material object, is not considered interactive, while manipulating a digitized representation of that same object is?
(2) N.b., an adult ticket costs $25.95.
(3) The 1977 film by Werner Herzog looks at Berliner Bruno’s emigration to the rural US, and just what trying to make it in the States entails. (Skip ahead to ca. 1:50 in the linked video if you don’t want to watch the set-up.)
Incidentally, two museums I do still love, and that do the odd thoughtfully and amazingly—as opposed to House on the Rock’s cheap shot—are Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology and St. Louis’s City Museum. Plus, as opposed to the standard art museum, neither makes you feel as if you’re being looked down on for your awful fashion sense, or as if the guardians would really rather you not be there.
(4) Or, as Manaugh aptly described it, “Piranesian.”
(5) Hopefully, average-Joe visitors aren’t made to feel as if they don’t belong.
(6) Try driving a team of horses while zoned out over your cellphone, and you’ll probably have to deal with an overturned wagon. For some trauma-inducing warnings about moving through pre-industrial life with care, check out, for example, the cautionary tales included in Struwwelpeter.