France’s most bizarre museum
FOR SEVERAL DECADES NOW German anatomist Gunther von Hagens has enjoyed success, or perhaps notoriety, through his Body Worlds exhibitions, featuring real cadavers, stripped to the muscle layer and coated in plastic.
Almost 250 years ago another anatomist, Honoré Fragonard, pioneered the concept of posing real, skinned bodies at the precise intersection of ghoulish fascination and scientific interest.
In 1766 Fragonard was appointed professor of anatomy at the École Nationale Vétérinaire de Maisons-alfort, south-east of Paris, and quickly set about creating a bizarre collection of tableaux featuring flayed corpses. He created some 700 exhibits before being dismissed from his position in 1771 on suspicion of being insane.
Only 21 remain today, including an Albrecht Durer-inspired man on horseback, surrounded by dancing foetuses; more human foetuses having a dance; and a very dead bloke holding a jawbone in apparent emulation of the biblical figure Samson.
The creations form some of the displays at the eponymous Musée Fragonard d’alfort in the Paris suburb of Maisons-alfort. Other attractions include preserved conjoined twin lambs, a calf with two heads and a dissected pig. Entry requires a small admission fee. And a strong stomach.
THERE IS A CERTAIN kind of in-joke that relies on a ‘smart’ reference and a groan-inducing pun or innuendo. Think “I used to be a structuralist but now I’m not Saussure” or “String theorists do it in 11 dimensions”. It has the shape of a joke but is really about being enough in the know to get it. When you laugh, you’re saying yes, of course I know that Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was the father of structural linguistics; and of course I’m familiar with what Stephen Hawking has called “the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe”. What kind of fool wouldn’t know that?
That’s the idea, presumably, behind The Mathematician’s Watch. The familiar numbers on the face of the watch have been replaced with mathematical formulae: instead of 1, for instance, it uses ‘tan(45°)’; instead of 2, ‘√4’.
The problem is that whoever designed it forgot the jokes.
What’s left is an accessory that quietly announces the wearer’s familiarity with arithmetic, and – perhaps more telling – loudly announces the wearer’s desire to be known as geeky or nerdy. You might have a grudging respect for someone who knows that log(55) is approximately 4, since memorising logarithms went out of style after the invention of the slide rule in the 1620s. Less so someone who thinks there is cachet in knowing that 3 × 3 equals 9.
A question arises: who would buy it? A kid who has skipped a couple of grades and wears a bow tie? Someone tired of giving socks to their emotionally distant engineer father? Don’t do it, folks: he’ll complain about the capital pi (Π) in the formula for 3, and insist that rounding g up to 10 is a recipe for disaster in even simple real-world calculations.
There is also the possibility your correspondent simply doesn’t get it. While most of the formulae are clear enough, the replacement for 11 ( 0b) is a stumper.
Suggestions or explanations welcome at michael@cosmosmagazine.com