News
Monday, 03 October 2011
Eccentricity and the Fourth Plinth
The University of Oxford Museum of the History of Science is well known in the city for its idiosyncratic exhibitions; the Steampunk exhibition (2009-10), which celebrated an underground artform, was incredibly popular, with queues of visitors stretching down Broad Street on its last day. This summer’s exhibition, Eccentricity, celebrates some of the more bizarre and unexpected objects in the Museum’s collection of over 18,000 scientific instruments.
Objects in the exhibition have been selected from amongst the curious scientific relics usually kept off-display in the Museum’s store. The Eccentricity exhibition is a rare opportunity to see some of the stranger items from this reserve collection. These are objects that don’t fit easily into a conventional history of science – why would a museum of science have a beer mat, a clockwork bird scarer, a civilian gentleman’s hat and sword, a crimping machine or a teapot?
But the Museum hasn’t just kept to its own strange objects – they’ve also invited members of the public to dust off family heirlooms, inventions and artworks and submit them to the Eccentricity Fourth Plinth. Objects are exhibited on the plinth for three days each, and so far the entries have ranged from a Victorian automatic page-turning machine, a musical plant, through art pieces and ingenious inventions, to true scientific gems such as a Tesla coil and the world’s first airbrush.
Objects have been submitted from all over the country, and one object, a set of geometrical blocks, was even brought over from Chicago by a visitor to Oxford. Others, including a pair of beautiful stormglasses (a weather-predicting rival to a barometer) have been donated to the permanent collection of the Museum.
The Museum is particularly excited by the plinth occupant for the final week of the exhibition: a sculpture by Anthony Gormley, whose Trafalgar Square installation One and Other inspired the Eccentricity Fourth Plinth idea.
The Eccentricity Fourth Plinth exhibition runs until 16th October 2011.
For more information, visit the Museum of the History of Science website.
