James Goldberg
It’s probably now safe to admit that I was skeptical when I first heard about the Church History Museum’s new avant garde wing. The people I knew who went all said it was inspiring, but like me, they’re all Mormons. We think everything is inspiring. I have literally heard people read from the dictionary over the pulpit and afterward everyone comes up to them and says, “That was so inspiring. I loved your talk.” You could throw a Mormon in the filthy basement of a rural Missouri jail, and we’d think it was inspiring. Give us a century or two, and we’d be trying to make a tourist attraction out of it.
Don’t get me wrong. That’s a healthy attitude to develop if God is going to send you to Utah. But I’ve been burned more than once by mistaking Mormon optimism for endorsement. I mean, I admire someone who thinks the world we’ve got is a step up from Eden, but I’m not sure I want their advice on real estate. And “divine potential” is a great doctrine, but I’ve learned the hard way that it’s not actually a positive art review.
So you’ll forgive me if I put off visiting the Church History Museum’s avant garde wing for maybe a year or two after the big renovation. I was busy. Doing. . .my home teaching or something, I don’t know. But then last week, I was talking about how I really need to get more exercise and one of my co-workers said, “Why don’t you go down with me to the new avant garde wing, and we’ll spend half an hour in their exhibit with the pioneer children treadmills where you just walk and walk and walk.”
Well. . .what excuse did I have? You can’t home teach during your lunch break now that home teaching doesn’t exist, so I said “yes, I’ll go.” And then I thought: if I’m going, I might as well head over early, so I can look at the rest of the art and get all my disappointment over with in a single trip. Just like my home teachers used to do.
And so I did. The next day I walked down to the Museum, and at first I couldn’t remember which way I was supposed to turn to get to the new wing, but then I saw this big J. Kirk Richards painting close to the entrance, and I remembered you’re supposed to turn toward Jesus’ left hand—and walked into the new wing.
There’s a little atrium as you get into the wing and the first display is a series of dolls made out of carved apples and potatoes and what have you, which was apparently a real 19th century thing to do when you weren’t busy making hair wreaths, and there’s a doll of Queen Victoria and one of Wilhelm Friedrich IV of Prussia, and one of the Daoguang Emperor from the Qing Dynasty—all these 19th century monarchs—and all these dolls have been dried and desiccated to look like they were actually made in the 19th century. They are captivatingly hideous. And looking at the whole row of dried up little queens and kings in their carefully knitted doll clothes with their tiny little tarnished crowns is deeply unsettling in the way only great art and human life can be. And then I notice that below them, embossed on the wall in this flaking-off golden paint is a quote about how the kingdoms of the earth will pass away before the day of the Lord comes.
I don’t know if “inspiring” is the word I would use for the kingdoms of the 1840s art piece. “Thought-provoking,” maybe, though that feels too shallow. As if the concept were just a gimmick, a little puzzle to work out, which doesn’t do justice to the almost tactile nature of the piece’s aesthetic. It’s a visceral experience to be faced with worldly glory so literally shrunken and faded. “Haunting” might be a better word. But I don’t want to overuse that on one exhibit when there’s so much ground to cover in the wing.
Off the side of the atrium is a 270 degree immersive theater with two open entrances rather than a traditional door. They only play one video in there: it’s a hyper-realistic reenactment of Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s last hours in Carthage Jail on, according to the plaque posted at the entrance, a four-hour loop. There are benches in the theater space in case you want to settle in for the long haul.
I didn’t even try. When I went in, John Taylor was lying on the bed resting. Willard Richards was looking absently out the window. Joseph was yawning, which was mildly interesting but passed quickly. Hyrum was sitting close to the Book of Mormon. I didn’t know, though, whether he was going to pick it up soon to read that passage in Ether for the last time or whether he’d already read it. Maybe an hour before? Maybe, come to think of it, before the four-hour video started? Even on a wall-sized 270 degree screen, it’s hard to look at a closed book and tell whether the corner of a key page has been bent down.
If, as the fruit doll installation out front suggested, one kind of meaning disappears when viewed from the distance of a century or two, another kind disappears when you zoom in too close in time and space.
I couldn’t stay there long. I had my friend to meet. And the mundane boredom of the whole thing bothered me: it’s unsettling to know something terrible is coming. I didn’t really want to try to sit there, because I didn’t want to know if I could stay awake for even an hour watching.
The next gallery was easier. There were some headphones you could pick up and a switch that let you toggle between Praise to the Man and Scotland the Brave: the notes don’t change of course, but the labels tell your mind which associations to add to create the matching music. There was a wall full of pastoral oil paintings which turned out to be an experimental Greg Olsen series of landscapes without Christ. Lots of trees. Large rocks for no in particular to sit on. Brooks. The occasional flower garden with blooming bushes full of roses and a single butterfly. Even without the very European Jesus to throw you off, they didn’t look very Galilean or Judean.
I still don’t know quite what their message was. Maybe they were designed to evoke the emptiness of a world where no salvation had been made? Or to make you long for the spiritual vision to see Christ in his conspicuous absence? Then again, maybe the point was just to draw attention to how late 20th century Mormonism, stripped of its spiritual content, looks an awful lot like it came from Thomas Kinkade. Sometimes the medium really is the message.
In the next room, I was delighted to find that the new avant garde wing (true to Mormon aspirations regarding the family) has a children’s section. The theme of half the room seems to be imagery from the gospels. There are several sturdy cubist sculptures of either sheep or goats—it’s hard to tell—for them to climb on. Inside what was either a massive stylized palm frond or a small boat on the Sea of Galilee, there’s a screen that plays children’s retellings of scripture stories accompanied by some truly trippy animations.
The other half of the room leans more last dispensation. There was an activities table next to the pioneer treadmills with copies of the scratch and sniff pioneer coloring book you can pick up in the gift shop: I was glad to see you can get the salt-and-vomit scent of the immigrant ship and the coal smoke scent of the train from New York as well as the traditional buffalo chip aroma so many of us have come to associate with the pioneer experience. There were also blocks, which older children could use to build their own Nauvoo temple, giving younger kids the chance to reenact the 1850 tornado that knocked down its north wall.
The pioneer children treadmills are, truth be told, actually more popular with their mothers. Personally, I think I’d find it a little overwhelming to face the unrealistic expectations of faith and culture for motherhood and fitness at the same time, but one man’s existential dread is another woman’s multitasking.
A few minutes after I got to the treadmills, my co-worker texted and explained he’d gotten caught up in another debate over the Salt Lake Fourteenth Ward Relief Society’s 1857 album quilt, so instead of him, I had the rhythm of modern day pioneer women swapping stories to keep me company for my half hour. There is, also, a video monitor of the pioneer trail landscape in front of you. In a single session, it’s monotonous enough to make the four-hour Carthage movie seem positively thrilling, but the woman next to me said she finds it soothing, and that if you have a long-term fitness goal, getting to watch the landscape shift from Iowa hill to Nebraska plain to Wyoming rock over the course of several weeks gives you a valuable sense of progress, and that the first view of the Salt Lake Valley is immensely satisfying.
I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll take her word for it or head back. Every day. Until I get to the Valley. Not because I need the exercise—goodness knows I do, but I’m not that disciplined.
While I was walking out, though, after I’d passed through the Christless Greg Olsen paintings and the toggle switch headphones, just as I stepped in the atrium and fell under the withering gaze of the royal fruit dolls, I heard shouting from the immersive theater. Then the thumping of feet running up stairs. Gunshots. Before I could really process what was going on, I found myself running into the theater as I heard glass break. And then I saw: Willard Richards, hiding for cover under the bed. John Taylor’s coat growing damp and dark with blood from five gunshot wounds. And the open window.
Oh Lord my God.
And I stood there as the screen went dark. Stood there and waited what felt like forever until the loop started over again.
Hyrum was folding down the corner of a page from the Book of Mormon. Joseph asked John Taylor to sing. It didn’t sound like it does in the hymnbook. More lilting and folksy. His voice steady and strong.
And for a moment, I could feel something pass through me. Not the Holy Ghost, necessarily, but an echo of the past.
And it was haunting, yes. But also beautiful. And even—in its own way, as I shared a few minutes in a small room with the memory of two men who were about to die and two more who have long since joined them—even inspiring.
But you should go and experience it for yourself. I don’t expect you to believe me.
James Goldberg is a co-editor of the Mormon Lit Blitz, an annual contest for Mormon microliterature, and an avid advocate for Mormon Lit. His critical essay “Wrestling With God: Invoking Scriptural Mythos and Language in LDS Literary Works” is available free in Irreantum 13.1. He won the 2008 AML Drama Award for his play “Prodigal Son,” the 2012 AML Novel Award for The Five Books of Jesus and was a 2015 AML poetry finalist for Let Me Drown With Moses. He currently works for the Church History Department, writing and editing content for the web and the Gospel Library App.