A Few of His Favorite Things

Abstract

logical odyssey, sailing away from the fleet to chart a stretch of foreboding darkness low on one horizon. Judging from reports, he has found a coastline there, a place of curling mist and whispering shadows where, as in any good folktale, things both are and aren't what they seem. In any event he shows no sign of returning, and navigates amid the mangrove roots with a compass inscribed W. Benjamin and an attraction to repulsion. This is his latest dispatch, and rather than a conventional map or treatise he is sending a cabinet of curiosities, filled with a welter of stories, observations, and artifacts dredged up through his passing. As the introductory note informs us, we readers are to take it as a response to the bourgeois museum form, epitomized by the gold museum in Colombia's central bank in Bogoti. There, fragments of pre-Colombian splendor lie undisturbed by reminders of the many aching hands that returned wealth from New World to Old, the past contained within the bank secured against the past that built it. Taussig's figurative museum, by contrast, practices a reverse alchemy of returning gold to the blood and mud of its production, and situating that impure mass next to a similar one for Colombia's current forbidden treasure, cocaine.