WHALES AND MUSEUMS — PARR 501 



When it comes to the larger whales, the museums would therefore 

 seem to have realized from the start that the body of one of the mon- 

 sters resting on the ground could not convey any of the grace and 

 power of the swift leviathans of the sea, but rather an image of gross 

 and feeble obesity, unless the evidence of a biologically important and 

 historically interesting principle were falsely denied. 



Jacobi, in his discussion of whale models, actually felt that even such 

 a small and firm species as the porpoise would be too distorted to make a 

 good exhibit, if a mold was made from a specimen resting on a dry sur- 

 face. Jacobi went to considerable trouble to obtain a cast showing the 

 true shape that this little whale holds in the water. But, without 

 opportunity to display life-sized models of the large whalebone whales, 

 Jacobi found it necessary to show miniatures of two of the beasts rest- 

 ing on shore, in order to establish the scale of reduction by the juxta- 

 position of human figures, which could not very well have been 

 introduced in circumstances that would be more natural for the whales. 

 Since the modeling of the miniatures was done with complete honesty, 

 they also show the shortcomings of whales on land, suffering the effects 

 of Galileo's principle from which they had found surcease at sea. 



The museums that wanted to exhibit life-sized models of the giants 

 therefore realized the necessity of showing them in their hydrodynami- 

 cally suspended and not in their mechanically supported shape, letting 

 the air take on the role of the water in the visual image. But pedestals 

 holding an object up from below are not particularly helpful to the 

 conceit of a body floating in space, and suspension from above there- 

 fore became the accepted method of installation as soon as it could be 

 safely used. 



Since unencumbered space large enough to suggest even the limited 

 freedom of an aquarium for beasts of such size is rare, the total im- 

 pression of a whale in the museum is one of conflicting images like those 

 created by a large boat stored in a barn. The space might fit the di- 

 mensions of the carcass, but it did nothing to suggest a marine environ- 

 ment. It is one of the merits of the fine new installation of a "sound- 

 ing" whale in the United States National Museum that it has finally 

 broken this deadlock between unyielding architecture and unwieldy 

 contents. 



To create the illusion of having joined the whale in its own domain, 

 or even of looking in upon it in its natural habitat, would obviously 

 be impossible. Any attempt to suggest environment by treatment of 

 the background would become a distracting and objectionable strain 

 upon the imagination. But, instead of giving in and simply present- 

 ing us with another whale in a museum hall, as others have done before 

 them, the designers, in this instance, turned their attention from the 

 impossibilities of the exhibit itself to the previously unexplored pos- 

 sibilities of its framing in space. 



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