Visiting the Dead Things with the Deathly Things

I always argue that there's something inherently Gothic about museums and working in them. You sift the relics of people's lives, and often specimens of flora and fauna, taken out of their original contexts and rendered uncanny as a result. They always contain more stories than can be told, and can retain a link with those stories - raising the possibility that they might heave back to an unnatural life and tell you what you didn't want to know. A museum may be a wunderkammer, but it's always slightly unheimlich.

So there's something peculiarly delightful about an exhibition of unreal museum objects, especially if it explicitly acknowledges the strange nature of collecting and displaying the detritus of the past. Yesterday the London Goths made a trip to the Superette Gallery on Sclater Street to see Many Dead Things by Alex CF. The specimens masquerade as the collection of one Lord Thomas Merrilyn, discovered in a London basement in 2006, and reflect the meticulous and often ill-fated study of a range of imaginary Victorian scientists and explorers. There are dragon's skeletons, vampire foetuses, and chests of equipment and gleanings very disturbingly similar to the sorts of things I used to find in the stores in the various establishments I worked in, full of bottles and instruments.

Alex CF creates, and very convincingly indeed, things we fear exist. The detail in these sculptures and assemblages is painstaking, especially those boxes of kit purportedly rescued from the camps of vanished explorers or vampire hunters. I was reminded of Stephen Jay Gould's wonderful book Finders Keepers, about real collectors of that era. I tackled Alex himself about this but he claimed not to have made any special study of that book or the subject in general - 'I suppose it's the sort of thing we all have pictures of in our minds'. Well, some of us.

Not only are some of the exhibits pretty grim in themselves, but they create an unwelcome fluidity between what is and what isn't real, and offer a dreadful pleasure. And that's as Gothic as you can get.



More about the Many Dead Things project here.