Skip to main content

An Art Gallery for Gerbils: Two Quarantined Londoners Create a Mini Museum Complete with Gerbil-Themed Art

London-based couple Filippo and Marianna's self-isolation project calls to mind artist (and museum curator) Bill Scanga's At the Met, exhibited nearly 20 years ago as part of the group show Almost Warm and Fuzzy: Childhood and Contemporary Art at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now known as MoMA PS1).

Scanga's installation involved hanging mini-replicas of works from the Metropolitan Museum's American collection on extremely long wires that traveled from under-ceiling picture rail to the baseboard, where a collection of art-loving taxidermied mice waited expectantly. One rested on a familiar-looking, black vinyl upholstered bench, a tiny blue shopping bag from the Met’s gift store parked near its dainty, shoeless feet.

Filippo and Marianna’s art-loving rodents are gerbils, and unlike Scanga’s artfully stuffed models, theirs—9-month-old brothers Pandoro and Tiramisù—are very much alive, as Tiramisù proved when he gnawed the unseen gallery assistant’s painstakingly assembled cardboard stool to bits under the watchful eye of the tiny Girl with a Pearl Earring facsimile Marianna crafted for his cultural enrichment.

A video the couple published on Reddit, above, shows the furry museum goers scampering under the benches to the tune of "The Blue Danube" and placing their paws on the artwork, including an expert, gerbil-themed forgery of Gustav Klimt’s gold-flecked Symbolist masterpiece, The Kiss.

Not to be vulgar, but if this museum has a restroom, Pandoro and Tiramisù seem to have given it a miss, an impropriety surpassing any waged by the titular characters of Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Filippo and Marianna accepted the destruction of their exquisitely staged set with a cheer that suggests they’re not shut up for the duration with a small child… just gerbils, who can be deposited back into their Habitrail when the fun’s over.

The attention to detail—the gallery tags! The laminated cards in multiple languages in a wall-mounted holder!—captured the imagination of Reddit. Users jumped Marianna’s original post—(Quarantine, day 14. Me and my boyfriend spent the whole day setting up an art gallery for our gerbil)—with suggestions of other famous works to recreate in miniature and add to the collection. Rest assured no groan-worthy, pun-based, gerbil-centric title was left unexpressed.

With cultural institutions temporarily shuttered for the good of public health, many viewers also shared their yearning to get back inside favorite museums. (Marianna reports that Filippo is a museum worker.)

For now, we must be patient, and live vicariously through gerbils ’til the long wait is over.


Via Hyperallergic

Related Content: 

Two Cats Keep Trying to Get Into a Japanese Art Museum … and Keep Getting Turned Away: Meet the Thwarted Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Take a Virtual Tour of 30 World-Class Museums & Safely Visit 2 Million Works of Fine Art

14 Paris Museums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Download Classics by Monet, Cézanne & More

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Like Choir! Choir! Choir!, she has been crowdsourcing art in isolation, most recently a hastily assembled tribute to the classic 60s social line dance, The Madison. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

An Art Gallery for Gerbils: Two Quarantined Londoners Create a Mini Museum Complete with Gerbil-Themed Art is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2Rt6UPY
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more