Hammers

The family and I took a brief trip to Haines, Alaska, this weekend to visit some friends. Between trips to refill the growler at the local brewery, I ventured out to the semi-famous Hammer Museum, which contains, as one might expect, a shitload of hammers. Perusing the collection, I was inexplicably surprised by the great evolutionary diversity of hammers and was impressed by the obvious centrality of these objects to all sorts of work, including of course those varieties (like printing) that are for the most part no longer performed manually.

One of my friends described the museum as an “ode to labor,” but the place is probably better described as a shrine to the device itself; if labor were actually the focus, you’d expect the museum to dwell a bit more on the context in which the hammers were used, and you’d certainly want to see more about the political symbolism of hammers, mallets and axes to various labor/producerist movements around the world — something like Moses Olney’s Worker with Mallet (1938) or, um, you know…

But that sort of thing wouldn’t fly in a place like Haines. Besides, a collection of old hammers is its own reward, and any place that’s fending off a bogus trademark claim from a massive Los Angeles art institute deserves its props.