Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors

By Way of an Introduction
The shop is perhaps best seen as an attempt to recreate or reinterpret with twenty first century sensibilities a 17th century Kuntskamera, a collection of objects assembled on a whim on the basis of their aesthetic or historical appeal, there is no attempt at creating or explaining any metanarratives or educating anyone, merely a display of naturalia and artificialia designed to give pleasure to the creators of the museum, who hope that you too will enjoy it

The Collection
From the 18th century on there was a manic urge to classify everything, to find it’s teleological roots, order and organise, name and prove, taking away the aesthetic beauty of objects and subtracting from the sheer joy of celebrating the diversity of the world, a desire to impose a meaning and a purpose on life.  The collector rejects both evolution and creation, is bored by science, or his mind is too limited to attempt to understand it, and wishes to give himself pleasure, these objects please him, sometimes they make him laugh, sometimes cry, but they help to pass the time in an otherwise empty mind & life.  Despite our rejection of our predecessors delineations and definitions it is perhaps helpful to divide the collection up into Naturalia & Artificialia & to further divide up those divisions, though we can make no promise of donating a meaning to anyone or anything.

Naturalia
The world is blessed with an almost limitless array of beauty, every pebble on every beach, every blade of grass, every rainbow contains within itself an enormous quantity of delight, however if we gathered the whole world up it would not fit in our basement so we have selected some choice specimens that amuse us, comprising minerals, fossils, plants & animal remains. The mineral collection is huge and varied, from jet to amethyst, taking in a ruby the size of a saucer, delineated like a spiders web, blocks of stone that have been cracked open to reveal a crystal world within, leading us to the fossils, whether they are truly the remains of long dead animals, or merely a test set by our creator to tease us matters little, they are beautiful, from the shoal of crabs to the enormous coelacanth, to the little dinosaurs caught running, to bits of mammoth and the skull of the recently extint  auroch – the ancestor of modern cattle.

Whilst much of what is in the shop is dead, much is alive, from the little mice that thoughtfully clean up any food that we drop on the kitchen floor, rewarding us with tiny poos for our collection to the wasp that buzzes against the shop window to our collection of plants.  The Last Tuesday Society’s office is housed in a former factory down the road with enormous windows and skylights and is filled with plants, from tree ferns & palm trees some three meters high to cacti & Euphorbia’s, though it is carnivorous plants, ferns, bromeliads and orchids that obsess us the most with several hundred specimens.  Few of these are housed in the shop as the conditions aren’t right, however in the window grows a small selection of Tillandsia’s, a genus of epiphytic Bromeliads we have imported from Guatemala where they grow sticking to anything in the air, from trees and rocks to electricity pylons; now whilst regrettably the climate of our dear beloved island is somewhat different to central America they should survive with some simple care.  They need to be positioned somewhere with lots of light and free air movement and, as they are without roots they need moisture, either spray twice a day or soak overnight once a week in a bowl of water at room temperature, with maybe a little fertilizer, there is also, normally, a particularly fine specimen of Platycerium grande – The Regal Elkhorn Fern, the Platycerium’s, or Stags Horns Ferns are an ancient genus of maybe twenty species hailing from the tropics – mainly, but not exclusively, from South East Asia & Australasia, they grow up trees and on cliffs, using their leaves to grip on and gathering soil up behind them,   This particular species thrives on neglect and can grow in almost any well lit space, and whilst appreciating a weekly water will survive for some time if forgotten. Sadly only four species seem to be available in this country and specimens ordered at great expense from a fern nursery in Germany all died. Downstairs in a terrarium grow a small selection of Nepenthes, descendents of specimens brought back by distant cousins from Borneo, a climbing genus of carnivorous plants that produce the most elegant and attractive pitchers, sometimes, and rather vulgarly called monkey cups, these glisten with nectar around the edges, luring in gentle six legged creatures to feast, getting richer and richer further and further in, until, perhaps befuddled with so much sweetness, they fall and are consumed by the digestive juices inside the pitcher.  Regrettably these plants do not seem to thrive in the home, as any of our friends, who against our advice, have bought one from Columbia Road can testify.  They die quickly.  For they are creatures of the tropics and require an unusually high degree of humidity to survive, they can however be fairly easily grown in a terrarium, obtain a fish tank, as large as you can afford, with a glass cover taking up at least 80% of the lid, place it on a bright windowsill, but avoid too much direct sunlight, fill with two inches of washed gravel, add water to one inch, then stand your plants on the gravel, water occasionally only with fresh rainwater, or distilled water.  As well as providing food and aesthetic pleasure plants also provide magic, they make us see things that aren’t there, like sounds, think in different and exciting ways, cause us to collapse in a heap of giggles, get lost, make new friends, vomit and loose control of our bodily functions and generally provide hours of limitless fun, in their halls of wisdom some politicians have tried to prevent us from having fun, however there are many historically important plants that we may grow, and you will often see in the window a changing display from our permanent collection, from Lophophora williamsii (peyote), to Trichocerus pachanoi, (San Pedro) to Mandragora officinalis & Salvia divinorum to Amanita mascara and other delights – as the good lord once said, let there be light.

The Dead
The superficial visitor often remarks on the sheer diversity of dead animals in the collection, from fur coats to monkey skulls, taking in taxidermied otters, owls, bacculae (penis bones) Lepidoptera, invertebrates, indeed there is unlikely to be a creature living that we would not house dead, given the chance, from a rhino to a mosquito in amber.

Of Animals
From the sea we have a startling array of shells, from the …. Shell that was copied by Frank /Lloyd Right to build the Guggenheim to the gigantic Syrinx Auraneous and Triton shells and Giant Clam Shells, to the elusive ghost shells, Nautilus, sharks teeth, saw fish, sword fish and more, whilst those giants of the ocean, the cetaceans, are well represented by an Edwardian Porpoise skeleton, a fine selection of that most beautiful of ivories, sperm whales teeth, some defaced with carvings – known as scrimshaws, not to mention that greatest prize of medieval treasuries, once valued at twice the price of gold – the unicorn, or Narwhal’s slender tapering tusk, which brings us to the fabled coco de mer, a large nut that looks not a little like a woman’s nether regions, often replete with the fluff that marks the gateway to her own private piece of heaven, once thought to be the fruit of giant trees that grow under water, but now, rather sadly, known to be merely the fruit of a type of coconut that only grows on one of the smaller isles of the Seychelles.
Animals have rarely, and we fervently hope, as avid vegetarians, died to furnish our collection with wares, but if they have we believe that the cause is just.  Farming animals and killing them cruelly, (and unless you’ve farmed and killed yourself you can not know how sweet or miserable their life was,) simply so that they can end up wrapped in plastic in a supermarket, and like as not be tossed in a bin half eaten is obscene and should be banned.  But think of the glories and the pleasures of a luscious coat made of the skin of an ocelot that once prowled the jungle of some distant American state, or a pair of shoes made with the finest Alligator leather.   But those pleasures aside, our taxidermy is all antique, relics of a previous age and time, and other items, such as the deer skulls with antlers, racoon penis bones & crow’s skulls are merely by products – rest assured no one has ever gone out and killed a coyote merely so that they may cut of it’s never regions, remove the penis bone and turn it into a key ring that we can sell in our shop.

Momenti Mori
Perhaps it may seem silly for us here to point out that we are but mortals, well let us lay arrogance aside, we are mortals, you may well be immortal, however we know that we will die, and that this world will pass, with or without us.  In previous times death was ever present and all around, corpses were commonplace, they are no less commonplace now but they are hidden & sanitized, people seem not to want to think or believe that their time is limited, that their hair is gray, that they have wrinkles, their hair is thinning.  Reminders of our mortality are essential to our lives, as is the company provided by the dead.  As we lie in our bed we can see the remains of some eight people – skeletons, skulls, foetus’s etc.  But more than mere reminders of times arrow, and more even than objects of great aesthetic merit they’re company, one is never alone with a dead person in the room.  When Bryan Adams borrowed our skulls for a photo shoot some time back and then took a while to return them, we bereft and the atmosphere changed, there’s something immeasurably comforting about the presence of another in the room, alive or dead.  The examples in the collection vary from the merely anatomical – specimens prepared as teaching aids in past centuries, - skulls & skeletons of adults, juveniles and foetus’s – some preserved in bottles of alcohol others fully articulated under domes, diaphanous, multi headed and limbed specimens are well represented both physically and in the quite exception archive of photos, x-rays and medical notes, to the bones and skulls abused by enemies.  In pride of place go our shrunken heads, at any one time we aim to have several in stock, our specimens tend to be 19th Century, not being purest we tend to prefer the ones that were made for the tourist market (and normally exchanged for guns) that are sculpted to retain as much of a human image as possible, with their eyes and mouths stitched shut to keep the soul inside.  Much has been said and written about these objects, but the end of the day they are indescribably cute, we also have a large quantity of Dayak Head Hunters Skulls from Borneo, with exquisite carvings some dating from the twelfth century, though the oldest human skull in our collection is a partially fossilized 10,000 year old specimen from Papua New Guinea with the bit missing where the axe that killed him met it.  Together with the real human remains we possess any number of anatomical models – some of a quite unbelievable beauty, or ugliness, ranging from 19th century models that quite delightfully take apart, to teaching models from the late 1980s where the muscle looks surprisingly similar to salmon, with an emphasis on those parts that most delight the school boy in us, the reproductive organs, or what we call the front bottoms, all our female staff have been cast and the results are in display in glass jars for your edification. We do hope that you will enjoy them as much as we do, and lest you feel that the back bottoms have been neglected these too have been cast and the moulds used to create some truly delicious chocolates, and whilst on the subject of Front Bottoms, we are particularly proud of what is, we believe, history’s longest standing erection – a proud male member that was removed from a hanged man in the eighteenth century & mummified (strangulation causes great genital excitement, as any Tory MP can tell you), elsewhere in the Botanical section you will find the Mandrake plant, that grows beneath the gallows from the spent semen of the condemned man).

Scientific & Medical
Whilst we can not begin to even claim to understand what most of these objects are for, (but can have fun trying, with, to take just one example, the speculum) we can but delight in their sheer clean beauty, someone has designed and built them with a purpose in mind, sometimes this is obvious, in the case of the stainless steel mortuary tables, sometimes less so, (in the case of elaborate and beautiful surgical tools – allegedly designed for removing bladder stones) but nearly always beautiful and perhaps useful in understanding what happens to us under the knife, and in days of spiralling medical costs and longer NHS waiting lists we pride ourselves on stocking everything that a DIY doctor, nurse or dentist might want.

Man Made Wonders, From The Uncanny to the merely curious
The collection is stuffed with objects that merely appeal to us, from broken MacDonald’s happy meal toys – so ridiculous that one wonders who thought anyone could think they were fun, even before we found them thrown away, to delightful tin representation of animals and robots that when wound up totter a step or two, whirr and die, to precious metals sculpted into babies arms and attached to silver chains to be worn around knecks, or into bejewelled spiders to crawl across our chests.  And then of course there’s then celebration of the human, of excreta, from the jars containing excrement from some of our favourite celebrities – from
Amy Winehouse to Virginia Woolf, to the educational illustrations of human reproductive activity, to marble phallus’ for the use of the less well endowed, to little pagan statues of gods, roman catholic images of suffering, remnants of saints and a box reputed to contain some of the original darkness that Moses called down upon the earth (tightly nailed shut).  Then of course there’s art and lots of it, and even more upstairs in exhibitions that change monthly, like the flow of a woman’s blood.

On The Original
Surprising numbers of our visitors wish to spend their time in trying to work out what is real and what is not.  A distinction that we do not see, nor understand.  Up until the Nineteenth century to call something original was to insult it, for if no one has done something before there’s probably a good reason, and so many people have done so much since then, and much of it to be regretted, that to be original or to claim to have something that is original can only really be seen as unlikely and extremely pretentious.

This shop and collection, part sculpture, part installation, part performance, part shop, part gallery, part museum is the latest in a long line of site specific installations and manipulated subversive social situations created by artist Silas Wynd.  Past work has included The Gently Perverted project from 2001-2003, “Why I think I’m So Fucking Special: - it’s all about Me” exhibited at Objexartspace in Miami in 2003, “Structures of The Sublime, Towards a greater Understanding of Chaos” & “The Sorrows of Young Wynd” at Ingalls & Associates, Miami, 2005 & 2006, “Loss; an Evening of Exquisite Misery” – a reinterpretation of Gunter Grass’s Onion Cellar Nightclub form The Tin Drum, and indeed that ‘pataphysical organisation The Last Tuesday Society itself.

VENUE HIRE
Our little shop can be hired for film, tv, editorial or event purposes.
Please email suzette@thelasttuesdaysociety.org with any enquiries