Conceptually, stains cover a lot of ground. You can stain your pants or your reputation or even, some believe, your soul. An abhorrent politician or policy can stain the integrity of an entire nation. The very definition of the word implies something that is difficult or impossible to remove. Witness the plethora of products that claim to destain fabric, teeth, a crime scene. Then again, some staining is purposeful, from resplendent cathedral windows to groovy tie-dye T-shirts. Dropped on cell samples, stains can reveal microscopic marvels.
The latest exhibition at the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover thoughtfully considers all this and more. Visitors to “Evidence, Residue, Memory: Stains” are likely to contemplate the blots they have themselves encountered, caused or tried to scrub away and to wonder whether therapy is in order.
Just inside the barn’s former milking parlor — MoEL’s space for current shows — a threadbare, paint-splattered shirt and pants present the stain as a badge of honor. The clothes are hung so as to suggest someone standing there, maybe a docent. A papier-mâché head instantly signals this character’s provenance: Bread and Puppet founder and “cheap” artist Peter Schumann. Signage explains that he lives by the eco-mantra “Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without.” Schumann’s “graciously loaned” work duds are meant to show how the accumulation of stains over time can literally hold an outfit together. (Insert metaphor for relationships here.)
Smudging and soiling are standard outcomes in certain occupations; in a cheeky “American Gothic” installation assembled by Vermont dairy farmer, librarian and artist Theresa Peura, two figures are clad in jeans and T-shirts amply adorned with “cow manure, iodine, oil, sweat, and other fluids and effluents.” Keep this peerless commitment in mind next time you dig into, say, a bowl of Phish Food ice cream.
Most stains on clothing, however, are unintentional and unwelcome. The museum offers plenty of examples, from the wholesome “Kid’s Jeans with Grass Stained Knees” to the heartbreaking “Stained Underwear, Note.” The latter contribution, from Emily Kate Hannapel, pairs a joyful message she wrote to her husband — “We made a baby!” — and the underpants she was wearing when she began to miscarry. “As many as one in four pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage,” the signage informs. “For Emily, the pain, the cramping, and the quantities of blood were both physically and emotionally devastating.”
No self-respecting exhibit on stains could ignore the big one — blood. But why do we find this essential fluid so icky outside the body? Case in point: periods. The display of reusable menstrual pads created by Elyse Glück will resonate with every female visitor over the age of 12. The menstrual stain is “one of the most complex, emotionally laden and evocative,” the signage begins, “encompassing a multitude of narratives — of coming-of-age, of public shame and embarrassment, of feminist reclamation, of menopausal rage.” The MoEL crew takes a stand on this: “We … imagine a world in which these innocent stains get knocked down a peg or two, becoming just a thing that happens, no big deal.”
Blood loss resulting from injury or fatality is far from innocent; it’s horrific, even to inured “CSI” fans. Happily, the museum’s curators did not see fit to stage a homicide, settling instead for two vintage pamphlets titled Blood Pattern Interpretation and Forensic Analysis of Blood Stained Soils. Interestingly, the signage tells us, American courts began to accept expert testimony regarding blood stains in 1957, and pattern analysis became commonplace after 1970. However, the practice eventually was overruled due to “discrepancies in interpretations and the lack of empirical data.”
Even less science-y is stain divination. (Raise your hand if you knew the word for this is “effusography.”) An inviting gallery installation includes a small table, a stool and a large wall chart featuring 17 symbols — that is, suggestively shaped stains and what they portend. A pregnant woman, for example, means coming change. An owl indicates approaching insight. And if you ever see a stain shaped like a little man with fists raised, victory will be yours. MoEL’s informative signage teaches us more fun words: Tasseography is the reading of coffee stains in a cup; hematomancy interprets blood stains. Other fortune-telling methods, it reads, involve stains on tablecloths and diapers (!) and the blobs produced by spitting betel or areca nut juice.
Next to the divination area, fittingly, is the Shroud of Turin. Well, not the 14.5-foot-long original; it’s a half-size offset print of the celebrity stain, on loan from Mary O’Donahue. For centuries, true believers have maintained that Jesus Christ was wrapped in this cloth following his crucifixion. Even in the print, a faint shadow of a man can be detected, along with repetitive, mirror-image markings that have something in common with the exhibition’s Rorschach samples nearby.
Paradoxically, divination and interpretation can give practitioners a sense of “expert” agency, even mystical power; they can be quite confident their reading is correct. Who can be certain it is not? But when is a stain just a stain?
There is no mystery in the wedding dress of one Ada Byrnes of Westfield, N.J., but there is a good story. Described as a “spirited girl,” Ada insisted on sipping a cup of coffee prior to her nuptials. But some mishap caused the brown beverage to splatter down the entire front of her dress. Like, it’s a really big stain. But Ada marched down the aisle anyway, a defiant act that must have engendered humorous recollections over her 70-year marriage. The dress, on loan from Ada’s great-granddaughter Cecile Harrison, became a family legend.
“Stained Dress, 1967” comes with a story of a different kind: one that didn’t happen. Meg Fisher purchased the cream-colored muslin “hippie dress,” writing that she felt “a physical longing to possess it and all of its certain romance.” But the frock hung unworn in her closet for years, then was sealed away in a box. When she recently unpacked it, she discovered a small brown stain on the dress — not the result of any actual living, but rather a stain “born of folded-up dreams, of waiting,” Fisher wrote. To this evocative telling, MoEL’s signage adds that “home remedies abound” for so-called storage stains.
An American flag might seem an odd entry in the exhibit, but this one earns its place with visible mud and grass stains. Invisibly, it holds the fervor of a young Vietnam War vet in the 1960s and ’70s. No name is given, but signage indicates that the Chicago-based soldier-turned-activist chose to carry his flag to protest marches — not because flag desecration was a crime, but because he believed the peace movement was just as “American” as supporting the war. In 1990, MoEL explains, in United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court struck down the earlier Flag Protection Act. It ruled that “the government’s interest in preserving the flag as a symbol does not outweigh the individual’s First Amendment right to disparage that symbol through expressive conduct.”
True to form, the museum has chosen an “everyday” topic and plumbed its depth: the irrevocable and the erasable, the accidental and intentional. “Stains” is by turns informative, humorous, pensive and wholly human.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Out, Damned Spots! | Stains have staying power at the Museum of Everyday Life”
This article appears in The Connections Issue.
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