THE THINGS THEY CARED ABOUT
The Main Street Museum doesn’t resemble a museum so much as an eccentric rural artist’s basement laboratory, a bit Ed Wood and a bit Silence of the Lambs. It’s a three-story wood-frame house on a postcard-pretty bridge in White River Junction, Vermont. The dark, low, interconnected galleries are encrusted with paintings, sculpture, taxidermy, and everyday objects, in an endless, airless clutter. The exhibits include: a glass candy jar stuffed with broken My Little Ponies, a vitrine that collects black plastic doll heads, a wall case showcasing “Round Objects” (like jar lids, drain caps, washers), and the desktop diorama of a plastic robot ravaging a naked Barbie doll.
The museum, led by young artist David Fairbanks Ford, is also a vibrant community center, with a small reading library and a stage for public lectures and performances. Its website explains: “ We are an ongoing, alternative experiment in material culture studies.” This experiment conveys deep anti-materialism and aesthetic abandon. The museum is only lightly curated; none of the displays have titles or labels. And there’s no indication that these artworks are precious. In fact, on the Sunday morning we visited, the building was unlocked and unmanned, with a wood box for visitors to deposit the $5 entrance fee.
The Museum is far too substantial, and effecting, to be kitsch, or some kind of hipster joke. One senses, amid the chaos, a genuine love for the objects, for the things themselves. Although the museum’s tone is Thrift Store Crazy, it’s no different than any other museum: an assortment of things that someone thinks is important.
Barbies Nightmare, Mixed-media assembly, Main Street Museum. Photo courtesy of Main Street Museum.