The Museum of Ordinary Objects

There is a town in central Pennsylvania that boasts of fertilizing more aborted museums than any other city in the nation. Most of these museums never made it past the initial planning stages, while others were usurped. For instance the Clock Museum in Columbia allegedly stole the concept long after our humble town had already begun construction on our building. Soon administrators began to complain of an unusual number of exhibition deals falling through, and we discovered that Columbia had been swiping all of them out from beneath our nose. Town hall scrapped the plan and almost put the property up for auction, until council member Argot Chattelry suggested recommissioning the structure for a new kind of museum. This one, he guaranteed, would garner no competition.

The Museum of Ordinary Objects consists of a typical three-wing design, two stories, a basement, and a rooftop observatory. In it you will find just about anything and everything you might otherwise come upon throughout the course of your day. There are tables, chairs, couches, potted plants, televisions, kitchen utensils, mechanical tools, ash trays, door knobs, bed posts, cleaning supplies, blankets, curtains, auto parts, radios, costume jewelry, watches, toothbrushes, reading glasses, baseball caps, and telephones. Each object is proudly displayed on pedestals, behind glass, or roped off on platforms. Small plaques, sometimes paper sometimes bronze, recount in brief the purpose and humble origin of each object’s general class, though the particular details of the things themselves is never given. Speculation routinely concludes that everything was purchased second hand out of pawn shops and yard sales, though a few objects here and there have the veneer of newness, as if they were picked up at a drug store, unpackaged, and placed directly on the shelves. In fact, on the second floor in the west wing is the refuse room, in which several of the wrappers, bags, boxes, plastic containers, empty bottles, and the like may have once housed some of the very items scattered throughout the rest of the building.

Most treasured among the complexity of feelings experienced by the typical museum patron is a deep sense of connection with the larger community. While normal museums will bring a person in contact with items never before seen, or only seen in photographs, connecting them to some distant and almost mythological past, the Museum of Ordinary Objects sanctifies one to another a shared experience commonly overlooked or taken for granted. The mundane is isolated from its invisible place in a continuum of daily life and placed under cinematic lighting, where every feature can be experienced in new ways. Additionally, there is the added treasure of discovering an object of the exact shape, size and color as one a visitor might have at home. Comments such as, “I’ve got a pair of shoelaces just like those,” can be overheard on any given day throughout the halls. This leaves patrons in anticipation of reunion with items long unnoticed; items now (thanks to our museum) infused with new value.

Like most museums, the MOO must deal with the anxieties and uncertainties of life, and so has taken steps to insure its treasures against theft. This decision was justified one winter night in 1989 when a famous Parisian jewel thief known as la Tortue Porpre managed to bypass the museum’s security systems. It took some time to realize what had been stolen, for he replaced the item with a replica, as was la Tortue Porpre’s trademark technique. In accordance with the terms of the insurance policy, administrators were not allowed to publicly reveal the identity of the stolen object. Many believe that the replica remains on display to this day. A traveling expert on Americana insists in several interviews that it is the plastic slanted spatula from the Barney Brilz memorial exhibit. But locals will tell you there was never any theft, that investors fabricated the entire story as a publicity stunt, and that this spatula, like every other curio in the museum, is authentic.