More and more museums are challenging the “traditional” model of the viewer’s experience. We usually think of a museum as a viewing station, with neat little exhibits displayed on walls or behind glass. While this view has been recently challenged by a Guggenheim exhibit that involves sculptures hanging from the ceiling, this museum
takes it even further.
The museum’s designer calls the exhibits “not science, not art, but something in between.” The museum increases the level of viewer participation and interaction with the exhibits. Visitors will be able to hurl down a steel, adult-sized slide while others laugh at their distorted faces through the slide’s transparent walls, trick their brains into thinking their noses are growing at an alarming rate, and even experience a simulation of running face-first into a tree. And this is just the start. The New Museum holds dozens of increasingly more bizarre objects. What I am most eager to try? Glasses that turn your perception of the world completely upside-down–literally!
Though there is a lot of science involved, the New Museum is considered an art museum. Though an adult-sized slide is not necessarily what springs to mind when one thinks of art, I guess there is something beautiful in watching everything you know be turned completely on its head.
I read about this and wish we had time for a visit. (Ok, maybe not the deprivation tank for me thanks, but I would like to try the slide…) there have been quite a few posts about how to engage with art, how to participate rather than just observe. this museum seems to be engaging in a similar inquiry.
I read the quote “not science, not art, but something in between,” and I quickly thought of Bodies: The Exhibition at the South Street Seaport which is a mix of BOTH art and science.
http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/
This is one of the most phenomenal exhibitions that I have ever witnessed, a true piece of artistic experience on a biological level. The museum showcases preserved and rubberized human bodies that are dissected by body system. Furthermore, Museum-goers travel through each displaying different systems of the body at work. For example at the muscular room there a body is conducting an orchestra. Other specimens are organized so that they are executing various other activities such as playing poker or even playing basketball. One of the most amazing presentations was of all the arteries and ventricles in a human body dissected and preserved standing alone without the body. If you would like to truly experience a “Science/Art Museum with a Bizarre Twist” this is a must see!
*****Furthermore, Museum-goers travel through each ROOM displaying different systems of the body at work.