Corona Daily 224: Treating the Present as History

Most galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs); the institutions that preserve our cultural heritage, are shut since March. A third of the museums worldwide are at risk of permanent closure in the next twelve months. I could write a couple of articles about the sorry state of museums, but it makes for depressing reading. Recently, though, I came across an interesting article by Andrew Dickson in the New Yorker. He talks to Alexandra Lord, a curator at the National Museum of American History in Washington. In a normal year, this museum gets more than four million visitors.

As luck would have it, in February the museum was preparing an exhibition called “In Sickness and in Health” about the Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic in 1793. Alexandra Lord was collecting materials for it, when the coronavirus struck. On 14 March, the museum abruptly shut.

Curators like Lord instantly recognize the hugeness of a story. They start thinking about how to tell the coronavirus story to the future visitors of the museum. The New Yorker says after 11 September, the rapid response teams from different museums had started collecting objects while the dust was, literally, still settling.

In the current pandemic, some museums collected diaries kept by children, essays by passengers infected on a Carnival cruise ship, masks, hand sanitisers, PPEs, ventilators and vaccines. The National Museum of American History alone has 1.8 million objects, most of them in storage. To bring in more objects requires serious justification.

Some ordinary artifacts can have great historic significance. Examples are a glass bottle melted by the bomb at Hiroshima. Or the desk clock recovered from the debris of the Twin Towers, with its hands frozen at 09.04. Finding such objects and preserving them for decades is a challenge for curators.

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While London’s Victoria and Albert Museum was shut, its rapid response curators created an online series called “Pandemic objects”. It features the history of handwashing, including a seventeenth century Iranian ewer used for the Muslim ritual of wudu, and a 1960 British sink. Some museum blog posts addressed pandemic beards, toilet paper, and mourning jewellery. In England, in pre-Victorian times, it was customary to set aside money in the will so your friends could buy a ring to remember you.

The Vienna museum has had more than 3000 pandemic items submitted to it. They include notices from the Vienna police department, hospital passes, homemade face masks, special contact-free door openers. There are funeral photos with only two attendees at a grave. Body bags are a heartbreaking artifact.

In Germany, a soccer ball from the first Bundesliga match with empty stadiums is considered to have historical value. Also, the holy water in packets distributed by churches to their members.

National Museum of American History has received objects and digital photos from the public. One of them is from the daughter of a pilot who flew the last commercial flight from the USA to China before travel was stopped in January. The digital photo shows a message her father received in the cockpit telling him to turn around and “deadhead” home, with no passengers.

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Alexandra Lord was surprised how few objects the museum had about Spanish flu, almost nothing. One reason, she says, was that back then museums weren’t interested in the lives of ordinary people, only royalty and aristocracy. Secondly, perhaps in the chaos of the second world war, it took people time to realise how serious the Spanish flu pandemic was. Lord also cites a more important reason: people wanted to forget the whole thing, rather than preserve any memories of it.

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Towards the end of the interview, Lord was asked about her feelings witnessing the great coronavirus story. She paused and said, “Back in May my mother died of Covid-19. We as curators, are part of a story we are collecting. It’s not just an unfolding event, many of us are experiencing it, too” she said.

Ravi