Gallery Guide | The Melancholy Museum

When the renamed Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts
reopened in 1999, with a new addition on its southwest quadrant, it
included galleries dedicated to the display of objects from the Stanford
family’s original collection. The Stanfords’ idea to found a museum
had emerged from their son’s capacious collecting and museological
inclinations. At home he collected and displayed toys, Native American
mortars and pestles, photographs, and taxidermied birds and animals,
to which he added Egyptian and Mediterranean antiquities, relics of
warfare, and other artistic and natural curiosities from his European
travels. After the boy’s death in Florence in 1884, his parents continued
to supplement his collection with objects from around the world—as
he would have done himself had he lived. Born of love and grief,
the collection kept their son’s dream of a museum, as well as his
acquisitive nature, alive.
What happens when a museum is erected to contain all that love
and sorrow? Although Leland Jr.’s death precipitated the founding
of one of the most illustrious universities in the world, which in turn
prompted the emergence of Silicon Valley and globe-changing
technological innovations, his art museum continues to be the site
of his mourning. While the proximate Stanford Mausoleum holds
the eternal remains of father, mother, and son, their ghosts inhabit
the museum. These apparitions take the form of memorial paintings,
mundane objects that Leland Jr. and his parents gathered and held in
their hands, goods of the indigenous people who originally populated
the region, mementos of the Chinese workers who labored for the
Stanfords, as well as artifacts of the family’s businesses, their Palo Alto
home, and their deaths. How can a museum present a collection that
embodies so much history and emotion?
All that grief, love, and mourning have found a new home in
The Melancholy Museum, an installation created by artist Mark Dion.
To house the objects Leland Jr. amassed, and the stuff his parents
accumulated to remember him, Dion has created a mourning cabinet.
The grand Victorian case houses the boy collector’s earthly and
otherworldly sepulchral goods as well as his parents’ heartache,
anguish, and hope. Through the past year, Dion has sorted through
the remains of the Stanfords’ lives and dreams. He has examined with
his own collector’s eye young Leland Jr.’s collection and identified
those materials that best tell his and his museum’s story. Assembled
on the cabinet’s shelves and drawers, the stuff narrates the boy’s life
and death through
images and objects
related to the four
elements—earth, air,
fire, and water—and
ether, his final resting
place. Individually
and collectively these
aggregated materials
give Leland Jr. and his
parents an afterlife
within the museum.
Dion also has
excavated other
Stanford histories,
of both family and
place. Digging through
Special Collections
Émile Munier (1840–1895), Leland Stanford Jr. and the Archaeology
as an Angel Comforting His Grieving Mother,
Center, he found
1884. Cantor Arts Center
assorted letters,
ledgers, and objects
to describe the lives and deaths of others whose lives and labor made
possible the university and the museum and its collections. These
causalities and tragedies are also represented in The Melancholy
Museum in the form of fragmented pots, tools, and bodies.
Through objects alone, Dion’s installation tells the story of how
one family’s rush West to sell hardware to prospectors resulted in the
accumulation of vast wealth and power. The furniture, photographs,
Native American objects, menus, and other artifacts of material life at
the turn of the twentieth century that comprise the artwork show how
the family upgraded its business interests to politics, the railroad, and
a horse farm, and how those interests were enabled by land previously
inhabited by the Ohlone people and the labor of Chinese and other
immigrants. Finally, the grand Victorian mourning cabinet, the heart
of Dion’s work, demonstrates how one teenage boy’s death resulted
not in the creation of the nation’s largest museum but in a museum
where love, grief, and mourning are forever entwined, The Melancholy
Museum.
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