What follows revolves around a brief passageway between the storage area of a museum of archaeology and ethnography, and a high energy physics research laboratory. Both spaces are housed by a large concrete structure built in the 1950’s, to house a cyclotron, an ›atom smasher‹, that is itself no longer in use. To reach the passage, I descended through three floors of tightly stacked museum storage racks on narrow catwalks, the repository of one and a half centuries of anthropological expeditions and archaeological digs. The descending walk mirrors the process of sedimentation, the layering and stratification over time back to the farthest reach of history. Upon reaching the passage and opening the door, a strikingly contrasting space is reached: a cavernous area with widely-spaced and distinct work stations manned by engineers, machinists and physicists, all scattered in a space that shows the full breadth of the original cyclotron. The doorway passes from the sedimentation of millennia to the search for original matter, where time has not yet begun.
The campus of Harvard University is an idealized setting, so much so that there one feels cowed by the weight of Anglified history. Harvard’s red brick and ivy is the ubiquitous symbol of the secluded haven of scholars, and the quads ringed by libraries and museums establish the plan by which American universities organize their terrain. Departments and buildings are endowed by generations of alumni to enshrine their pursuits and their gifts, as well the capital endowment, which consistently places Harvard as the wealthiest of academic institutions. Rarely can one feel such a stark sense of the difference between private and public education. Much of this character is quite literally the façade of the university, and behind the doors things do quickly return to normal. My tour was via the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, a one-hundred and forty year old institution founded by London financier George Peabody, whose mercantile fortune established more than a dozen American museums.
Museum storage has come fully around from that which must be concealed to a resource that can make each museum appear vibrant and available, a new wilderness to be explored. Opening up the storage areas of museums, for research, extra space, exhibitions or artists’ projects, is an effective strategy by which museums appear interactive, contemporary and transparent, all the requirements of the millennium, regardless of what is actually contained there. The use of museum storage as an edgier exhibition palette has gone from an interventionist strategy by artists of institutional critique, to an efficient and economical version of expansion and synergy between museum departments.
While researching a small collection of motion picture film at the Peabody, I was introduced to other areas of the museum storage facilities. Indeed, I was invited to poke around with an eye towards the exhibition potential for a contemporary artist. The Peabody collections are comprised largely of artifacts from the Americas, especially native American and Mayan examples, as well as Africa. The extraordinary amount of activity generated by the university and the museum combine to create a vast quantity of stuff – literally too much to know. Recent work at repatriation of human remains and ritual artifacts has resulted in few returns but in a great deal of overdue inventory work. Finally, the shifting trends in the styles of archaeology and anthropology create a tidal effect. The collection began with an early penchant for trophy exhibition pieces. By mid century the collection shifts to a post war emphasis on research, rather than exhibition, and the accumulation of every incidental scrap of burnt bark or rusty nail. Most recently the collection emphasizes a middle ground that is deeply self-conscious of the institutional destination of the objects, so that cultural sensitivity and hybrid approaches dominate. In this process, the museum now seems to be turning inside out: as active storage becomes available for other uses, so too the museum holdings are transformed from the preserved to the interpretive.
Peabody storage is divided firstly according to the climatic requirements of the objects, and then by the peoples, regions and time periods represented, as well as the areas of expertise of the archivists. Inorganic storage, of stone and pottery for example, does not require the same environmental conditions as items such as hides and feathers, and is more easily housed off-site.
The Peabody’s inorganic storage is the cyclotron – a massive but almost unmarked cold war relic at the center of the Harvard campus, and a facility only recently revived for new high energy physics research. The cyclotron is a large subterranean track allowing for the acceleration of atoms. At sufficient speeds the atoms are smashed together to produce glimpses of sub-atomic particles. Peabody storage is divided firstly according to the climatic requirements of the objects, and then by the peoples, regions and time periods represented, as well as the areas of expertise of the archivists.
Between the Peabody storage and the physics lab is a thin metal wall. The archaeologists and students cataloging on one side of the wall, and the physicists and engineers testing and assembling on the other, have little contact. Each side have their own entrances and exits, their own water coolers and bathrooms. When I went back and forth, my guides from the museum were curious and a little unsure about the other side. On the museum’s side and nearest the door is the only open space, an area for a copy stand and photographic equipment, portable racks for the artifacts to be photographed, and a computer to log the data of the image.
The other side of the door is more like a warehouse than a laboratory. Free standing clean rooms have been built inside as antiseptic modules. In the open area are the tools of machinists, crates and loaders. Inside the clean rooms collider rods are assembled. These are gold-tipped cylinders approximately ten feet long, two inches wide and are designed to surround the core of a collider in an array. The technicians wear white lab coats and hair nets, in contrast to the archaeologists’ street clothes. After testing, the rods are packed in massive crates for shipment to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. These are my brief impressions of a juncture that haunts me for its simultaneity.
In the genre of time travel, the image of the passage or portal is a constant. Jules Verne’s Time Machine, and its bastard Delorean in Back to the Future, are distinct vehicles within a genre that otherwise employs doors, windows, closets, halls, gates – openings of all kinds, even rabbit holes. In a time travel story, we are never just on one side or the other, but are always in both simultaneously: wherever we go, there we are. From dreams of birth we arrive at portals leading us to the near-death experience, the final passage, where someone has left the light on. And when time travel is combined with science fiction (and it isn’t always) the distinguishing feature is that these portals are weapon and battle field – a contested device or terrain, where the time-travel machine stands for knowledge itself.
I have always been thrilled by institutional salvage, the surplus and disused mass that cannot be thrown away and so gets left in store, to stand as nothing more than the tools of the dead. But museum storage is different: it purports to be final, the discoveries and classifications complete. To find such a collection contained by the cyclotron is to see our human history collapsed, between our beginnings and our end. Perhaps the cyclotron is itself an artifact suitable for the Peabody’s collection, completing the museum’s inversion so that its final anthropological artifact is its own irradiated sarcophagus.