TSENGWICH

I’ve worked for two years in the Museum of Natural History, and only after those two years have I begun to really understand museums. Sure, a museum is a tourist attraction, a hang-out spot, and for me, a lab to do research, but the reason for a museum’s existence, I gradually learned, is more enigmatic.

One would probably say the museum is an educational place, but having explored exhibits, and having worked with well-learned post-doctorates, I learned that much of the museum’s exhibits were outdated. This fact boggled me: if museums are educational institutes, why wouldn’t they spend more money on renewing old information in their exhibits? Why is even the Brain Exhibit, one of the newest, in the museum plagued with faulty information. The main reason for museums must be elsewhere.

I don’t think Museums are mainly research facilities either. Even though, there are scientists doing research in the back rooms of museums, most papers come from universities. The museum would never get the amount of money to fund that kind of research. So, what is a museum? It’s not an exact representation of the past, nor a full-time advocate for the facts of the future.

I find it to be a constructed world of reality and fiction, a world of its own. That’s what I believe a museum is. It takes aspects of the past and also the imaginations of the exhibit designers, to create a world for an audience to walk into and lose themselves in. It is not entirely true and life-scale, but why would the spectator want it to be? The act of imagination on the spectator’s part is half the job. The act of imagination, propels the feelings and beliefs aroused in the spectator, to influence and mold their future. It touches them. So in this way, the museum is a kind of novel, where only a restrictive form of expression is given (exhibits as words), where the reader must imagine. The museum is an advocate for a better world.

The International Center of Photography is not a museum I am familiar with, and words can only do so much to describe a center’s mission. But from what I’ve seen of the building (and the security guards when I visited) and the press releases, I can presume that the mission of ICP is to construct a place not only to preserve photography, but to perpetuate the beliefs of its artists. They had envisioned worlds, of better hope and peace and social justice, and captured them in photographic form; and the ICP, by putting these worlds on display, immortalize these artists and their beliefs, and insert them again into society which needs them.

The actual mission statement is here.

http://www.icp.org/about-icp

My closest tie to the Twin Towers is my mother, who worked there for ten years of her life. So I guess I’ll begin there. The story begins in 1993, when she was working in Tower 2. She was a new accountant on the 22nd floor when the truckload of bombs drove into the building. I don’t know how she felt about the disaster (she doesn’t express her feelings well), but I can imagine a new mother with a new job entering into a new threshold of her life, halted at the doorway by bombs. She must have been scared; so many different emotions. My family was never into commemorating things; but with this fearful event, we did something. Though the thing we got was little, to us it was big.

We got a mug. As a child, it was my favorite: dark blue with the word “Remember” on it, to commemorate the victims of the bombings. My mother bought it, and I grew up drinking from this cup, wrought from the pain of memories. When 9/11 came, my family didn’t have any losses, but others did. And they truly had to drink the pain down whole. I’ve read the stories of so many different 9/11 experiences, all so heartfelt and grandiose, and pertinent to the human experience. But mine is so petty. I never deemed it worthy of being inked, and I still don’t. But this assignment beckons, and I guess I have to.

My mother stopped working at the towers 2 years before 9/11 occurred. She wasn’t in the towers, so we didn’t get anything at all to commemorate her safety. Perhaps this is reflective of our collective attitude towards the disaster. We didn’t get a mug, my mom wasn’t too scared when she came home. Were we indifferent? That’s how I remember it. …But I did worry. She had worked there for all of my childhood, and when I saw the first airplane hit, my brain in shock had forgotten that she worked someplace else. I was so scared. “Is mom in those towers?” “No,” my dad answered as we watched TV, “She called and she’s walking home now.” I thanked God for having spared my mom by such a large margin of two years. But these thoughts lasted only for a few seconds.

The bulk of my thought process made no sense; I don’t even understand my thoughts now. They were so petty. I thought next of these pickled radish sandwiches my grandma used to make for us, and their taste when we ate them picnicking at the base of the towers. I missed the taste of the sandwiches. I missed my grandma. I wanted my mom to be home. And I didn’t want to see the towers burning on TV anymore. So, I told my dad to turn the television off, and we sat there in silence in a living room unlit, waiting for my mom.