“The Power of Poison” at the American Museum of Natural
History
The skull of an Eastern rattlesnake is one of the items on display at "The Power of Poison."
Don’t go outside.
Don’t venture off the beaten path.
Or, at the very least, don’t go to Colombia.
These are
the life lessons with which one leaves the American Museum of Natural History’s
new exhibit, “The Power of Poison,” which runs through August of 2014. In this highly informative and multifaceted
exhibit, the uses and applications of nature’s many poisons are pinpointed, but
it’s difficult to escape the images of the creepy-crawlies in the natural world
(especially those in the Chocó region
of Colombia, a focus of the exhibition) whose very bite or sting could cause
unimaginable pain or even kill.
But
from an intimidating, three-times life-size reproduction of a colony of bullet
ants—whose stings cause such all-consuming pain that they have been compared to
being shot; thus the name—the exhibition winds onward, through thousands of
years of study and the perception of poison by humans. Macbeth’s
three witches are invoked, as well as Medea and Hercules in Greek myth. Throughout, what becomes clear is the human
race’s fascination with venom, and how often it has become interchangeable with
the idea of magic in the public eye. As
a result, it’s only natural we’ve come to associate spiders and snakes with the
same kind of ethereal fear we reserved for warlocks and sorcerers in earlier
centuries. Both had the theoretical,
generalized power to kill. The museum
seeks to ensure we are more educated about our demons than our ancestors were
about theirs.
And
if one chooses to understand their fear of poisoning, if not to overcome it,
one couldn’t choose a better outing than a day at “The Power of Poison.” In the dark, winding halls of the museum’s
special exhibition space are displayed not only reproductions of poisonous
animals but also, behind glass, some of the animals themselves. (Some blindingly yellow poison dart frogs are
particularly interesting.) All is
well-organized if more sparse in nature than some of the museum’s past
exhibitions in the same space.
Certainly
it is organized uniquely, which was clearly the goal of the curator, Dr. Mark
Siddall, from the museum’s department of Invertebrate Zoology. His intent, obviously, was to create an
exhibition less in the vein of, say, a “Beyond Planet Earth” or a “World’s
Largest Dinosaurs” and more of a parallel to AMNH’s 2008 “Mythic Creatures,”
that is to say, more engaging on an artistic or a speculative level as opposed
to a scientific one. That worked fairly
well with “Mythic Creatures,” but one couldn’t escape the feeling, at that exhibition,
that the subject matter was well beyond the scope of what is traditionally
defined as “natural history.” Here, the
topic is right—something we all intrinsically fear that ought to be better
explained—but its issues are the same issues “Creatures” suffered from. When you leave the recreation of the Chocó jungle and come upon life-size, off-putting
Macbeth witch dummies stirring a pot
of nuclear sludge, you’ll inevitably feel that the exhibition ought to have
been limited to the first room.
This is because perception from the perspective of
storytelling, while interesting, really can’t come close to the purer natural
history in the animal section. Later,
when the exhibit touches on famous historical poisonings, it picks up some
steam, but there must have been more poison in nature to discuss than what I
saw.
Still, a Natural History Museum exhibit is what it is—pure,
well-researched information—and it makes no apologies. If the goal of coming to a museum like this
one is to learn (and I should hope it is), then an afternoon at “Power of
Poison” will not be one wasted. It also
couldn’t possibly hurt to be able to identify a few of the critters the exhibit
has to offer, in case you should one day happen to find yourself visiting Chocó—although,
given what I have learned from the museum, I wouldn’t recommend it.
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