I

Imaginary Museum

It’s an old country. One day out in the back of beyond you come across a small town, run-down because many of its young people have headed for the city. In an unpretentious building you discover a local art gallery-cum-museum. A solitary caretaker puffing a pipe turns on the lights and you are startled by the paintings on the walls. You smile at some of the quaintness but basically you are very impressed by this local school. There is a pleasant sense of artists having worked closely together. Here are old images of heaven and hell that now have a surreal air. You’d like to understand this odd iconography but the caretaker has a curiously literal approach – he tells local stories about the paintings as though he were pointing things out to you through a window. Still, he’s a compelling talker, and the small town has changed so little over the years that it’s not difficult to feel your way back inside the artists’ frame of mind.

[R. Horrocks, ‘The Invention of New Zealand’, AND 1 (1983), p. 9]

Le Musée imaginaire:

• The Imaginary Museum
  Stanley Wm Rogal (New York: ECW Press, 1993)


• Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art
  Joseph Stanton (New York: Time Being Books, 1999)


• Imaginary Photo Museum
  Renate & L. Fritz Gruber (New York: Random House Value, 1987)


• Bali the Imaginary Museum: The Photographs of Walter Spies & Beryl De Zoete
  Michael Hitchcock & Lucy Norris (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996)


• Paris Eros: The Imaginary Museum of Eroticism in Paris[*]
  Hans-Jurgen Dopp (Parkstone Press, 1994)


• The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades
  Donald Davie (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1977)


• Van Gogh’s Imaginary Museum: Exploring the Artist’s Inner World
  Chris Stolwijk (Editor) (New York & Amsterdam: Harry N. Abrams, 2003)

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[*] See >Short-term Memory Impairment.