Mindfully Stylish

My key for this evening’s fancies lies in a note I received not long back ~ a card from a lady dear to me scribed in her pretty neat handwriting with a £20 note taped inside.

Enclosed was a little booklet, a museum guide as it turns out. But it didn’t read like a museum guide, more like a cross between stylish pithy witticisms and a (particularly saucy) History Channel episode on pagan erotica. I was utterly intrigued. Plus, I’d just had my hair done (vanity creeping in here ~ not that I was on the hunt for attracting any horny pagans but still)…

So off I trotted, dressed as appropriately as possible to visit such a museum. It is named The Last Tuesday Society – Museum of Curiosities.

Here we are:

The Last Tuesday Society / Viktor Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities
11 Mare St, London E8 4RP

Admission is £6 with a cup of tea on request (very important).

Let’s take a look at a few of the objects and fascinating finds on display, shall we? ↑ All were collected by the proprietor of the museum himself, Viktor Wynd. But do you want to know what I truly love about this museum?

Its ethos:

“The society is dedicated to subverting life, the universe and everything bored of the life and world it sees around it. [It] seeks to create a new world filled with beauty, wonder and the imagination…

The society is aiming to become a non-profit with full charitable status – until that time it is run as a benign dictatorship by the Chancellor, Viktor Wynd.” 

Viktor Wynd himself has led a life so tantalisingly atmospheric that it seems to both elude, entice and encourage biographical investigation all at once.

Described as a “pataphysicist*, writer, curator, collector, dealer, dilettante, naturalist and antiquarian” working in the field of Relational Aesthetics, Wynd counts the most intriguing participative installations and exhibitions under his belt.

*Pataphysics is a difficult-to-define literary trope invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907). One attempt at a definition might be to say that “pataphysics is a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions.” I’m wondering if Viktor Wynd actually wrote the Wikipedia entry himself.

One such audience evening was entitled “Loss; an evening of Exquisite Misery” where guests were invited to “dress in Decaying Beauty, chop onions and cry.”

Another such event is Wyndstock – The Country House Party. This is Viktor Wynd’s 21st-century reinvention of the masquerade ball, which he threw in gay abandon for several years at Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

You can also watch a National Geographic documentary on ‘A Day In The Life of Viktor Wynd’ here and it gives some great shots of the museum too.

So ~ where was I going with this? The whole point here is A) I was impressed with the museum and with the ethos behind it. But what I was also impressed with was a characteristically libertarian attitude towards curation, which often falls victim to restrictions from council- or government-funded projects. It was refreshing.

And the joy of it? The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities avec le bar up top. Try the cocktails, which come with ‘scorpion-flayed-on-a-stick’ as a garnish. That will really have your taste buds going.

Or perhaps you could indulge in some pretty twisted voyeurism as we did ~ watching a sea anemone eat its way through a rather large crab that had fatally wandered into its clutches in the giant tropical fish tank on the wall. Isn’t Mother Nature beautiful? Yup ~ the upstairs of this museum is a fully-stocked cocktail bar of the weird and wonderful which you can enjoy whilst perusing the objects and various stuffed animal heads on display…

Or perhaps the ones in the cabinet downstairs ↓

Like several other items I encountered in the museum, the story of this gold-plated hippopotamus skull is so good and so plausible that one wonders whether it could ever have been fabricated… The sign below it states that it once belonged to Pablo Escobar ~ a Colombian drug lord and narcoterrorist so ‘successful’ and wealthy that he has been dubbed ‘The King of Cocaine’, supplying an estimated 80% of U.S. imported cocaine in the early 1990s. His income totalled $21.9 billion a year ~ the wealthiest criminal in history and one of the richest men in the world.

In the late 1980s when Pablo’s wealth was coming to its height, he decided to build himself a zoo (which was open to the public, even schoolchildren) and imported four hippos from Africa in a shipping liner bound for Florida ~ three females and one male. But one of them didn’t make the traumatic journey and died by the time it got to the island.

Strangely distraught (for a drug lord), Pablo ordered that its skull be plated in gold in reverence to the hippo. It was sold at auction by the Colombian government for a reported $12,000 (£8,500). And now it sits in the Viktor Wynd Museum… I’ll let you be the judge.

The Viktor Wynd Museum is now one of my most-loved and most-admired spots in London.

I hope you enjoy it if you decide to visit!

In Love&Light, FS XOX