A Rabbit in a Surgical Mask and the Ghost of the Last Moth (plus news about a great exhibition and free champagne breakfast this Saturday)

Things are always best seen when they are a trifle mixed-up, a trifle disordered; the chilly administrative neatness of museums and filing cases, of statistics and cemeteries, is an inhuman and antinatural kind of order; it is, in a word, disorder. - Camilo Jose Cela

Museums are the cemeteries of the arts - Alphonse de Lamartine

I have always loved museums: It is with a particularly desperate and undoubtedly misplaced nostalgia that I remember the then Natural History Museum’s ‘Museum Club’, where I got behind the scenes museum tours and learnt how to make Rayograms and slept on Navy ships and ventured to Robben Island (this is while it was still a prison) and, even better, my first and only viewing of a corpse; charred and wrapped in bandages at the Albany Museum. Through my family’s dutiful cultural excursions I learnt not only an appreciation of the magic of discovering (almost always beautifully useless) information, but also developed a fetish for the uncanny order that museums impose on their collections, something that is particularly evident in the twisting corridors beyond the public’s eye.

I was working in one of these back corridors at the Iziko South African Museum until recently and, in a way that seemed unfathomable to almost everyone else who worked there, I loved wandering into work in the morning. There is the smell of dust and old books and glass eyes, the constant dusk (I never understood other employees’ pleas to lighten the museum) and the oppressive quiet, broken by the sexiness of long Latin names, speaking, as with everything in the museum, a dead language, and a language of death. For it is outside of the whale well (tainted for me always after endless hours of perspectival sketches in First Year drawing class) and the whale’s mournful song, away from the cheerful planetarium and, even, away from the hugely inaccurate, ever-affable dinosaurs, in the carpeted halls of taxidermied animals that I am most happy. My belief that knowledge, order, classification and death are all undeniably and sensually linked, is concretised here, more than anywhere.

Of course, as dead as it may seem, classification, naming and collecting are all incredibly insidious. While everyone knows of the horrors of colonial pillaging - sacred objects stolen from villagers left with matchsticks while their belongings, now relegated to the authorship of nameless natives, lie in dusty well-lit shelves, the Natural History Collections seem somehow cleaner – as dead, but with fewer ghosts. One of the greatest moments of any working day happened amongst the ghost of an extinct moth. While exploring a room filled with cabinets of impaled moths, I asked the not- unsexy head of Natural History Collections if there was anything extinct in the room, He gleefully skipped towards one of hundreds of unlabelled draws and showed me a singularly uninteresting pale yellow moth. This is one of only two ever found in the world, he beamed, and we have both of them here. He continued to tell me the story of how this moth was collected by a British general in the Boer War. I look for blood splatters on its wings, something I found only in the painted innards of a bird in the taxidermy department downstairs (as you can see in the picture I took above).

All of this rambling is leading to the exhibition that I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of today. Fritha Langerman’s Subtle Thresholds, at the Iziko South Africa Museum, presents a fantastical disordering of the mechanics of classification, collection and death – with elements of Natural and Social History collections curated amongst her own surprisingly quiet, yet complex, prints and lightboxes. The exhibition explores the taxonomies of infectious disease, focusing particularly on its position as ‘different’, ‘outside’ and ‘other’, and noting that classifications and representations of disease are culturally as well as medically coded. While this may all sound painfully printmaker-esque, this exhibition is good. Really good. In fact, I think it is one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time. Certainly, it presents the best use of taxidermied animals I have ever come across (remember Lyndi Sales’Things). Of course, since I work for Iziko, I can’t review it, but still I think everyone really should go and see it – it is dark and sad and scary and complicated and strangely carnivalesque. And absolutely worth the visit.

Also, there is going to be an awesome champagne breakfast opening this Saturday at 11am. And there’s nothing like drinking and schmoozing under the watchful eyes of a taxidermied rabbit in a surgeon’s mask.

Subtle Thresholds Opens Saturday, 11am, The South African Museum (the one with the whales)