London’s “Last Tuesday Society” is announcing the opening of the Viktor Wynd Museum of curiousities. The Museum will be hosting an exhibit devoted to the magician and artist Austin Osman Spare this coming February through August.
Their site explains the mission of this muse-um:
“The Museum will present an incoherent vision of the world displayed through wonder enclosed within a tiny space, no attempt is made at classification and comprehensiveness, instead the museum focuses on the pre-enlightenment origins of the museum as Wunderkabinett – a mirror to a world so suffused with miracles and beauty that any attempt at categorization is bound to fail. Where contemporary museumology hides 90% of a collection, attempts to educate and explain, to put the world into neat little labeled drawers dictated by an obscurantist elite establishment that has shown itself in error many time over the centuries & is obsessed with a pedantic overspecialization of so called “knowledge” that means little or nothing to anyone outside it’s narrow little field & oft discredited metanarratives this museum will merely display everything that has glittered & caught the eye of it’s founder – from rare priceless marvels of the natural and scientific worlds like Dodo Bones or speculum to the intriguing beauty of McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys, from old master etchings to prison inmates & mad women’s doodles, occultists paintings and pop art prints, the horrors and wonders of nature, two headed kittens and living coral. By placing the rare and the beautiful on the same plane as the commonplace, banal & amusing this museum seeks not to educate but to subvert, to show the world not in a grain of sand, but in a Hackney basement. The Museum has no overreaching aim beyond the theft of it’s visitors time and the hope that it will provide amusement by return & hopes to fill the vacuum between what the establishment elite believes is worthy of worship & what exists in the world.”
“The Museum will include a permanent collection, lectures, parties, exhibitions, cocktails and food. A place for the wraiths and strays of London’s forgotten bohemian world to gather amongst the dead and the beautiful on deep crimson velvet banquettes, sip absinthe & encage in lively and languorous intellectual debate.
“The Museum will be divided into two parts – The Upper Galleries with up to two art exhibitions a year and The Wunderkabinett displaying high (& low) lights from the permanent collection in a double vaulted basement, arranged as a gesumskunstwerk in custom built and salvaged museum & jewelry cases. At the end of the final chamber, past the dead babies & butterflies in The Lion Room deep velvet banquettes surround a sarcophagus holding a 19th century human skeleton, surrounded by erotica & overlooked by a caged lion skeleton & a disturbingly powerful Mervyn Peake painting. The Lion Room is available for private hire for dinners and intimate encounters for up to ten people.”
For more details visit:
Thanks to Soror Hypatia for the tip!
