The Positive Voices

“Oh my God, the Old Museum was a wonderful place! I used to go there all the time. The New Museum just sucks – it doesn’t have a fraction of the stuff the Old Museum had.” It was the umpteen-millionth time I had heard such sentiments expressed by a common citizen “on the street,” as it were. Mention the former Grand Rapids Public Museum on Jefferson Street or its replacement on the banks of the Grand, among regular folks of a certain age, and you will hear similar opinions expressed emphatically and at length., as they tick off a long list of all the old collections, exhibits and features they remember and miss. Carping like this was very loud back in the mid-90’s when the new museum opened and the old one closed its doors to the public. A decade before, when my wife-to-be and I were dating, we loved to explore the old museum and spent many hours prowling its rambling maze of halls, galleries and displays. Despite a significant disparity in age, taste and opinion between us, we were in total agreement that the place down on Jefferson was (to use Cliff Robertson’s line from “The Great Northfield Raid”) a“wonderment.” By the ‘90’s, a lot of Baby-Boomers like us were too distracted raising kids to prowl much anymore. But, when chaperoning school fieldtrips to the new museum, almost every fellow-parent I spied looked puzzled. Presumably yearning for adult conversation, these complete strangers would sidle up and say, “This is it? They’ve got to be kidding.” A lot of landmarks in the history of Grand Rapids (and its neighboring environs, of course) have fallen under the Wheels Of Progress, regrettably. Most have been demolished and replaced with either parking lots or remarkably unremarkable modern structures. Large ornately-framed pictures of them are prominently displayed on the walls of almost every business, office or public facility downtown, sort of like weird stuffed and mounted hunting trophies - ironically apropos considering how complicit downtown business and political leaders were in destroying them in the first place. People gaze at these enlarged photos of Old City Hall, the Old County Building, etc., all the vanished landmarks, and wistfully regret their loss. But the appearance of sentimental attachment is illusory. Except for the bureaucrats who worked in these hives, how much real personal attachment can anyone else have had in these old government buildings? I got my first passport in the old Federal Building, which also housed the draft department that shipped my generation off to Vietnam. I had draft number 9. The recent bulldozing of the high school I graduated from was a bit of a shock. But, truth be told, most people recall their school days with mixed emotions, as in the ever-popular children’s song that begins, “Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the Burning of the School.” The old Grand Rapids Public Museum, on the other hand, generated strong sentimental attachments unalloyed with recollections of people one had an unquenched desire to push down an elevator shaft. Also unlike most of the other landmarks, it didn’t vanish under a wrecking ball. It’s been standing in the same spot at 54 Jefferson for the last sixteen years in all its late Art Deco glory with the huge letters on the front: GRAND RAPIDS PUBLIC MUSEUM, looking just like Old Times and taunting passing citizens with a constant reminder of the amazing treasures they used to find inside its doors . . . now locked. The main hall and galleries opened to the public 1940. Over time, numerous expansions and annexations of nearby buildings turned the place into a wonderfully quirky, rambling maze that one could spend hours exploring. All those newer parts have been converted into storage space for the museum and City and County government archives, but the original part has gone mostly unused and left as it was when the doors closed in 1994. Recently, a seeming miracle occurred – the doors were unlocked and the public was invited to visit. They packed the place. “We went there on opening night,” a friend told me, ”but we couldn’t see anything except wall to wall people. We had to go back another day to actually see the old museum.” I was a latecomer to the party - like, three days before it finished up its month-long run, and it was still pretty crowded. From all accounts, the place never had a “slow night.” “Wow!” my son commented when we got inside, ”Now this is what a real museum should look like.” Alex was only five when the place closed and was seeing it for the first time. He ate it up, despite the fact that most of the objects previously on display were missing and the place resembled the museums in Iraq – after looting. Surprisingly, the reason the doors were open and what the public was invited to see was advertised to be an “art exhibit.” According to the exhibition guide they handed out, students and faculty from Kendall, Calvin, Aquinas, GVSU and U of M were involved, plus others. Could have fooled us. There was a large fabric curtain shaped and colored like a whale hanging from the ceiling where the whale skeleton used to hang. Underneath it, taking up much of the central hall floor, stood a huge wandering stack of glassfronted boxes with handles that turned out to be all the little stuffed birds and animals in mini-dioramas that used to be taken to schools for presentations. Alex found some drawings he liked, but most of the “art” was well camouflaged, made to blend in with the old museum surroundings and appear like leftover artifacts – sort of. Of course, most modern art these days could be best described as “sort of.” A lot of the big old dioramas were still there, complete with their original stuffed beasts. But in some, an object of modern art stood in the place where moose or whatever once stood. Still, I have to give these folks a lot of credit. I’m sure they surpassed the last record attendance for a student art exhibit ANYWHERE – and by several orders of magnitude. As a setting, the old museum itself was bound to upstage almost anything displayed there. So they just went with it and made it the main subject of EVERYTHING. They titled the exhibition “Michigan – Land of Riches” from an old display still hanging there and subtitled it “Re-examining the Old Grand Rapids Public Museum.” Looked pretty sly to me. If most of the visitors came because they wanted to see the old museum itself (and that was exactly what they appeared to me to be doing), the organizers could still claim they were doing exactly what they, and the “art” on display, had invited them to do. They had managed to get some objects from the museum collections put back in the display cases like remnants of their former contents. There were lots of other signs and symbols either left or restored. Sort of. The giant cell and many of the old human body displays were still there and lit up, although they had mixed up the order of the three-dimensional fetus development models. There were lots of other things that seemed to be deliberately not quite real or not quite in the right places. They gave “Brown Bag Tours” of the back rooms and museum collections in storage. The held (or fabricated?) public input-sessions on what people thought should be done with the old museum and scrawled their suggestion in grease-pen-like graffiti around the museum. The top suggestion seemed to be “re-open,” as in put the stuff back in the cases and open the doors. There were lots of suggestions for converting it to other uses, but those seem to miss the point that actually drew the crowds. Converting the place for completely different uses would erase almost everything about it that the public very evidently craved – something like the old museum. Whether any of this furthered the goals of modern art, I don’t know and don’t care. But if you were to claim that the organizers were actually agents provocateurs and the plot was to reignite debate over the public museum in Grand Rapids, I would find it very hard to disprove and highly admirable. The official name of the new museum is the “Grand Rapids Public Museum at the VanAndel Museum Center” (something like that), but the public and the media call it “The VanAndel Museum” because it just isn’t the same kind of place and doesn’t seem to be about Grand Rapids anymore – at least not like it once was. That it “sucks” isn’t really debatable because it’s almost impossible to find anyone outside of the previous and current administrators and financial supporters, and the Grand Rapids Press, willing to seriously argue that it doesn’t. “Sterile,” “soulless” and “boring” are the most common polite descriptions I’ve heard. I think part of what they mean is that it’s exhibits, the interactive ones included, are inherently didactic in character – like getting lectured to. “I’d rather they just put the objects out there and let me discover their meaning for myself,” says Alex, “like the old museum.” Some people assert that newer generations will be just as sentimental and nostalgic about the VanAndel Museum, eventually. “Not a chance,” says Alex. Similarly, people will claim that it’s just not possible to reopen the old museum, because it would “compete” with the new one, and they raise the “you can’t turn back the hands of the clock” argument. G.K. Chesterton would always retort that of course you can. You can wind the hands backwards as well as forwards to set the time. When people find they’ve gone the wrong way they go back to get where they want to go. Almost any contrivance of man can be as readily undone as done. The real reason people with power don’t want to fix the really big mistakes is because they don’t want to admit they were wrong – and they can spend taxpayer’s or investor’s money covering it up and holding out. In the early ‘90s, museum leaders claimed we had to have a new museum because they couldn’t retrofit the old museum with modern climate controls. But they’ve now done exactly that for the collections and archives. The other claim was that the new museum would allow them to exhibit much more of their collections. That claim looks pretty laughable now. Oh, and they had to display their carousel. In an absurd aluminum and glass igloo that prevents anyone from seeing much more than small glimpses of it at a time. Remember New Coke? The Coca-Cola company recognized their mistake fast, ditched the new version and turned “Classic” Coke into their flagship product. They took a lot of ridicule but in the end they could laugh all the way to the bank.