David
Harvey: I do want to say something about the rain forest—you've
had a lot of information and impressions from primary sources. I was
a latecomer to this process, so you'll get some secondary but close-at-hand
hand observations from me. After I came here and heard about how science,
education, and exhibitions are all supposed to work together and what
an interesting collaboration it is, I sort of dropped into this project
about a year before it was to open. And I found it wonderful. I actually
was really taken with—and I think it's important to say this—the
audacity of this idea of doing a haul that evolved, as Willard will
tell you, into a permanent hall about biodiversity, and this at a
time when the concept of biodiversity was fairly new. We worried whether
people really know what biodiversity means. Will they understand the
title of the hall? Will they understand what it's about? But the audacity
of coming up with a permanent hall that is about the sixth extinction,
and man's role in it, just struck a chord. I felt that this was such
a worthwhile endeavor that somehow I would have to make it through
that first year and see it through.
What I found was a group of extremely dedicated people who had come
together with talents and knowledge from these three areas [science,
education and exhibition] and built an incredible model of this rain
forest, and also had defined these parallel zones in the hall. Zones
that dealt with the beauty and wonder and diversity of life, with
both evolutionary and ecological biodiversity. This, the Spectrum
of Life, which you've now seen, is a very high tech backlit apparatus
for showing the 28 areas of life. The idea of putting them on a wall
was—well, I didn't quite know how it could be done. But seeing
this exhibit and its references to the history of collections—the
ways of showing collections, the jars of alcohol specimens and other
kinds of specimens, and the roughly 1,500 specimens or models included
on the wall—is almost overwhelming. To come into the hall and
see the exhibit as part of a physical experience just helps to reinforce
the beauty of it. It's 100 feet long. There are 28 groups represented
that illustrate evolutionary biodiversity. And in front we have touch
models—I'm not sure they show up on this—but they're interspersed
with those screens. And we have interactives, which are a way of navigating
the entire wall and going into levels of information about it. This
is a model, by the way, that we have followed for the cosmic pathway
leading to the Hall of the Universe. The idea of navigating the whole
of time and space while you are in only one place at that moment is
a wonderful way to go into the story.
Let's see. What we did was go to the different departments of the
Museum with Applebaum Associates, and look at the collections and
cull objects from the departments - with each of the department scientists
participating in the selection of specimens and models. What you see
up here on the fifth floor of our exhibition department are specimens
being prepared for the wall. Now this is unconventional, because usually
we like to put these things under glass. Dust never sleeps, as conservators
say. So we took special precautions in selecting them and preparing
them to be up on the wall. And this took months.
The exhibit is bigger than the sum of its parts, I think we'll all
agree. I think that the Hall of Biodiversity fuels a sense of discovery
for the people moving about it. The fish and specimens that line the
ceiling very nicely tie into the Hall of Ocean Life, which is important.
And as you leave the biodiversity hall and go north, you move into
the Hall of Planet Earth. And there's another really good tie-in,
because there you see evidence of the fixation of iron from the atmosphere,
and the creation of an atmosphere and of conditions for life, and
the black smokers [hydrothermal vents].
This is Steve Quinn working on a different tree in Africa. As Joel
said, we collected. We have crates and crates of all sorts of impressions
and samples. To do the rain forest exhibit in this little time, as
Joel said earlier, was daunting. I landed smack-dab in the middle
of the production schedule. A fabulous rain forest model had been
built to scale, and we had about a year to go to the opening. Melissa
Posen, Willard Whitson, Phil Fraley and Steve Warsavage - quite a
number of people brainstormed about how to do this. Was it going to
be a white box? Was it going to be a black box? What happened above
this height—say, the height of this room. The action really doesn't
start in the canopy until way above this height, yet we had to imply
that it was all there. So we went to a kind of a black-box approach.
The ceiling went black. The light came from the ceiling and filtered
down. We developed a two-storied approach to installing the rain forest,
which involved some people working above and some people working below.
We sent out the drawings for the topography to a shop which sent them
through a computerized system to a router. They basically fed a truckload
of plywood into one end of the machine and cut out the plywood according
to our contoured drawings. That all came in like a jigsaw puzzle.
After being set up outside in another space, all of the trees-many
made here, others made in other shops under our direction—were
brought in, coordinated, and installed. Plastic leaves, vacuum—formed,
500,000 or more, were distressed, painted, wired, and placed on branches.
The awe of nature can be achieved in easier ways. And the idea of
being deliberate and planning what we view as a kind of restful, wonderful
chaos—it's an oxymoron. I mean, it's almost a contradiction.
But after distressing ourselves and distressing the trees and the
leaves and everything that we built, you know we got there.
Here you can see that the overall result is greater than the sum of
its parts. You saw the camera man in one of Phil's slides. There you
see, in the back, a video of the actual view from where you're standing—this
is what you would have seen. This is real. This is accurate, and this
is also the portion on this end of the rain forest that has been compromised
by human intervention.
I just wanted to talk about the ongoing development of the hall. We
feel that the hall should also evolve. It should change, and it should
reflect recent discoveries. We had the amazing opportunity of getting
a giant squid—none of which have ever been seen alive in nature—at
the museum. It was taken unintentionally in New Zealand in a fishing
expedition, and was flash-frozen and trucked to New York from the
West Coast. We decided that people had to see this. And we also decided
that it was a frightening proposal because it's 25 feet long and weighs
250 pounds and had to be shown in alcohol. The idea of putting alcohol
of that quantity in a public place does not go over well with the
City of New York, with any safety code anywhere. So again, another
little challenge. We talked to colleagues at the Smithsonian who had
just done something ingenious with another large specimen and we proceeded
down that road only to find that what would be appropriate here was
a tank that would be even more secure than their tank because of New
York codes. We ended up going to a manufacturer of tanks for hydrochloric
acid and chemicals like that, and asking them to build a window into
one of their tanks, and then asking the city to approve it. That took
over a year. Meanwhile, the squid was laid out, injected with alcohol,
poked and inspected, and I even went up and touched it at one point.
It was a pretty strange experience. We prepared it. That's where it
lived for a very long time—in a stainless steel tank—and
you can see everyone on the fifth floor of our building just pondering
it. What we did was, because of the length of it—half of that
length is in the two longest tentacles—it's kind of exhibited
like this, which doesn't seem to bother a lot of people. We found
a place for it in the hall that seemed appropriate for it within the
story. We built it in such a way that the tank itself was concealed,
and we executed the graphics and display for this object in a way
that was really consistent with the original intent of the hall, and
in fact, the squid looked as if it had been there from the beginning
except for the banners that were there for the press opening, when
this picture was taken. I would very much like to see additional discoveries
and additional breaking news-in terms of great artifacts—come
into the gallery. I like to see it as a living gallery, with changes
in addition to the Biobulletin and the other elements that are updated
in the exhibition interactives.
And lastly, there's a very nice, almost poetic of symmetry about the
squid. Across the hall, on the ceiling, in the Parade of Life above
the Spectrum of Life, is the oldest model in the museum, purchased
in 1895. It's a model of a giant squid. So one can look at the model
in relation to the real thing in the hall. And it's kind of amusing
to go into the Hall of Ocean Life and look at the diorama of the squid
locked in mortal combat. It's a really poignant look at the history
of museum display in adjacent galleries.
