May 15 Musee de la Chasse

I'd had such fun at this museum the previous night, I dragged Ira to it this morning. It's really almost insane. Someone has taken a perfectly boring museum about hunting and animals and made it a madcap mixture of old and new, traditional and experimental. The first room you walk into is the "Boar Room," which is fairly traditional. There are paintings of boar hunts and then a stuffed sanglier in the corner, all sharp tusks and wiry hair. Just off this room is your first indication that all is not your grandfather's hunting museum. It's a small owl room. I've put in two pictures here, but they really can't convey how eerie this closet is. It's dark, and there's a stuffed white owl head seemingly floating in front of you. And then you look up and the ceiling is covered with owl heads looking down at you, feathers radiating out from each large-eyed face to meet and overlap so that the entire ceiling is covered in feathers and beaks and those yellow glaring, staring eyes!


Next up is the stag room, of course with taxidermied, antlered resident. There was a photography show on the ground floor about animals in houses, called Animonuments, and the artist had taken this stuffed stag out and photographed it in a lot of places. My favorite was the beast surrounded by hunting dogs who were sniffing it curiously. Not quite what they were used to!

Then there was the wolf room. Look at the friendly guy I've placed here. Laughing at us or threatening us? It seems like both. WOlf as trickster coyote. There's such an odd melange at this place. I've been twice and now I can't imagine going to Paris without coming here.



The unicorn room was one of the strangest, another small space, this one lined with shelves and containing objects like an oversized curiosity cabinet. There was a unicorn horn, of course, but the rest of the items moved more strongly into pure fantasy. There were abstract creations of bone and horn and hide. There was a video of a white unicorn in a heavy rain, moody and seemingly purposeless. There was a specimen jar filled with some type of animal abortion, too complex to be anything but the early stages of a nightmare. Have I mentioned how strange this place is?

Dogs, monkeys, birds, horses... they all get their own room. There's always a mixture of animals and objets and contemporary art pieces that make you take a second look at the more traditional art that surrounds it. Whoever curates this museum has done a wonderful job. Perhaps the strangest piece is in the trophy room, which is lined with heads of African beasts, at least 100 of them. As you walk in, there is a motion detector that starts one of the heads. It's a pure white boar, whose tusked mouth starts to move as it groans and roars in an unearthly manner. Then it begins to talk in a guttural voice, seemingly foretelling your doom in the pits of animal hell, consigned to be endlessly trampled, gored, and eaten as the spirits of dead animals exact their eternal revenge. It's creepy as hell, anyway.

What a museum! I loved it. We have friends who are joining us in Paris and I might just have to take them there. I'll leave you with one last image. It's like a dense waterlands of reeds, made out of cardboard. In front of this is an old-fashioned cabinet with brass buttons and the names of birds, perhaps fifty of them. When you press a button, you get the sound of the bird's call. If you press enough buttons, you get a symphony of the calls, just as if you were in a thickly populated marsh. Wonderful!