- What the ...
How do you even make something like that?
Welcome to Show & Tell.
This is a series that Atlas Obscura started
because of this strange moment we find ourselves in,
where we are all stuck at home with nowhere to go.
And we figured what better time
to reach out to all the incredible people
we know who have amazing, interesting stuff,
and ask them to show it to us
since they're literally trapped with it right now.
And today, we're going to talk
with one of our long-time collaborators,
artist, sculptor, skeletal articulator, television host,
Ryan Matthew Cohn.
Did I get that right, Ryan?
Did I list the ... I'm probably missing something.
- You forgot obsessive collector and curator.
(laughter)
- Obsessive collector is probably the first
in the bulleted list of things.
- Yeah, I've been an antiques collector
since I was a little boy and it sorted of blossomed
into this new historian collection that I have now.
- What is your specialty in the world of collection?
Well outside of collecting, I sort of dabble in osteology.
I wouldn't call myself an osteologist, per se,
but in dealing with medical specimens
for the amount of time that I have,
I've gotten good at restoring these types of things,
and working on them, and then creating pieces
such as this one here.
This is a piece that I created for doctors
to study the density of bone inside of the skull.
So you can see it's cut into many different segments.
- When you say you created that, what do you mean?
- So it's a 19-century medical, real human skull
that I've sectioned into 15 parts.
So, it's a pretty lengthy process
and one that requires a lot of patience
because if you have something too thin
then the pieces are not gonna fit closely together.
- You have to be in a very small
and potentially terrifying group of people
who understand the intricacies
of what it takes to saw through a human skull.
That is a subset of knowledge
that not a ton of people possess.
So you were gonna show me something
and I was gonna do my best
to take a guess at what this object was.
- Okay.
- You have something to try and stump me with.
- I do have a rather obscure item
that I think if you just took a look
or took a glance at it, it might stump you,
but I'll show you this first.
- Is it a giant ... ?
It looks like maybe an organ like some kind
of part of an eye, like some enlarged body part maybe?
- Kind of.
- Yeah, okay, I'll take a guess.
I'm gonna say it is a ...
What is that?
Like a spleen.
It's like a model of a spleen.
I don't know what a spleen looks like.
- So it's not a spleen.
- I'll give you that so far
but I will reveal another detail of this
and it might make you figure out what it is.
- What's it made out of?
- Papier-mâché.
- Oh wow.
So that is a tiny ... that's like a little fetus in there.
- Indeed.
- Okay, and what did you said it was made out of?
- Papier-mâché.
- Okay, I know what this is.
It is a obstetric model, obviously,
of a womb with a fetus in it.
And if it is made of papier-mâché,
I am almost positive it was made
by an artist named Auzoux, I think.
Az-oh? I can't remember how to pronounce it.
A-Z ...
- You say Az-oh, I say Az-oo.
- (chuckles) We bought a zoo.
- Yeah, Auzoux.
That's what I've always called it, but you are correct.
It's a three-month womb.
So this was made
by Louis Jérôme Auzoux
in the 19 century.
This particular piece was part
of a larger set of that would show
the different developmental stages of the fetus.
So this is just one part of it,
but it's a little hard to see but
I'll bring it closer to the camera.
You can see that everything is pretty well represented.
The little fetus is made out of papier-mâché.
Every little nerve, vein is represented
in there in different colors.
And then it's hand-painted and numbered.
And then it has this little viewing window
that's a bit cloudy and a little hard to see.
- I totally didn't read that as, like, translucent,
that you could look in there.
- With a lot of his pieces, they were used to kind of study
every aspect of whatever you were looking at.
So in this instance you're looking at a womb
and he wanted to have a form of viewing window.
- What is another thing in your collection
that you particularly prize?
- This is one of my favorite pieces.
Like people ask me constantly,
"What is your favorite piece in your collection?"
I would say that this is definitely one of them.
This was made by an anatomist
in the 19 century by the name of Tramond.
And for collectors of medical preparations,
especially those from the 19 century,
this is sort of the cream of the crop.
This is what, like, every collector admires
when you go to medical museums in Paris.
You'll usually see examples of these.
This is a human skull that has been adorned
with wax, nerves, veins, and arteries.
As well as a wax eyeball with a glass iris or pupil.
So what's cool about this one that it opens up
so that you can look at the interior
as well as the exterior.
So there is a certain level of detail on the inside
but if you look closely ...
I'll try to bring this closer to the camera.
It's very, very intricate.
You can see every nerve, vein, and artery.
- That's cool.
So those are wax, all the veins and arteries, are wax?
- Yes, and then it's mounted on stand.
- Do you think of yourself as a macabre person
or a gothic kind of person?
- No, I mean maybe I'm a little gothic
in my presentation or my look,
but no, not really.
I'm just fascinated with this stuff,
much like a historian is fascinated
with some element of history.
I find medical preparations
from the past very, very interesting.
Not only for their history but also for my own art
and things that inspire me.
- These are amazing objects you're showing me.
These are such crazy things.
I mean they're really completely arresting.
Are you happy to be trapped with all your stuff,
or is it oppressive to be trapped with all your stuff?
- Oh no, I love it.
We just moved recently so I went from having one floor
to three, so now I can work down in the basement
bring the stuff that I'm working
on up into the collection.
And then I'm working on a skull room right now
but I haven't quite finished it.
- (chuckles) What is the skull room?
What does that mean when you're done with that?
- I mean it's just that.
It's, like, most of my skulls in my collection
and some of my wax collections.
Sort of like the oddities room
even though my entire house ...
(laughter)
like if you look around it's a giant oddities room.
We're sitting in my parlor right now,
so this is just like a couple of things
that I have here but the house is pretty full.
- Cool, that's awesome.
All right, yeah, next object.
- I think you might have seen this
because I know you've been over to the house before.
- I've seen this.
This is one of the things that blew my mind.
It's funny because I'm here, it's hard
to tell scale, but that thing is huge.
Yeah, it's definitely bigger than you are.
- So I'm sitting next to it
and this is literally how big it is.
It's at least twice the size of a normal human head.
And the reason why it's so large is
because it would have been used in anatomical theater.
And so in order for the entire amphitheater
to see this piece, they made them much larger.
In fact Auzoux would create gigantic eyes and gigantic ears.
And so if you were studying the ear,
everybody has to learn every aspect of the ear
as part of the curriculum,
they would make these oversized models
I've never quite seen anything like this.
- I love the oversized anatomical models
but this one is really different.
Usually it's really specific.
It is like a big brain, a big ear,
a kind of some detailed piece.
This is a whole other level.
- So this would be known as écorché.
It was used to demonstrated the relationship
between bone, organ, and the skeletal system,
or even the muscular system.
So if you'll look at this one, again, it's a little hard
to see but you can see you have the veins, the muscle
and then in here you have many of the organs covered in
bone, and this is entirely made of wax.
I think the only thing on this that's another material is
the base, which is made of bone
and once again the pupil is made out of glass.
But everything is numbered,
so as part of your study,
would learn every part of
what you were looking at once again.
- Where did this one come from?
This incredibly, unique, giant wax figure.
- This came from Germany.
So about, I don't even know how many years it is now,
three or four years ago,
I purchased an entire museum from Munich.
- So you got the whole museum?
- I bought the entire museum,
and later on sold it to Alamo Drafthouse
and then partnered with them
to create what's now House of Wax.
At the beginning part of my career, any museum
that was willing to maybe part with some of their
items that, whether they be wax or skull,
I would try to save them
and kind of keep them in my own museum.
- Yeah, so you see part of your mission
as a preservation mission.
These objects that, once museums deaccession them,
people don't realize this,
but natural history museums will take a bunch
of stuff and basically just send it to the garbage,
because they run out of space
and they decide things are no longer important.
Like when a whole medical museum closes,
a lot of time those specimens
don't necessarily end up somewhere good.
That's an interesting part of it.
- They get incinerated and that is very, very common.
Schools, universities, museums.
They just don't have the space
and there is only so much that at this point
we can learn from early medical preparations.
There is so much technology now
where you can do pretty much anything.
You can scan a human.
You don't really need
a 19-century wax version to do that.
Now, are they fascinating? Absolutely.
Do they tell a part of our medical history? Yes.
And I think that is the appeal to many people,
and that's why I keep X amount of pieces
in my collection now.
The rest are in museums.
- I have one last thing and then we can wrap this up.
I need your advice on something.
- Sure
- It's a project I've been meaning to do
for a million years, so one second.
- (chuckles) I think I know what it is.
- You do know what it is.
I have been talking about this for ...
So backstory,
this is a moose skull.
Here is a moose vertebrate.
These, along with all the other bones
that makeup a whole moose,
have been in my basement
in various places.
They were in Brooklyn, now they're here,
they were in the office for a while.
We had this for eight years, but I need help.
I don't know how to make this thing
into an actual thing.
- You just do it in different sections.
You do the neck first and then you do the body
and then you do something to make it be able to come
off of the base, because that thing is big.
- The bones all together weigh like 100 pounds,
so I need to be able to hold it up somehow.
- Yeah, we have to collaborate in the future
to get that thing together.
- It's a pretty incredible object.
The scale of it is wild.
- Yeah, it looks like it has all of its teeth
and so there's no horns that go to that?
- We have no antlers.
I think the hunter kept the antlers because that's the ...
but otherwise we've got it all.
We got all the little bitty, fiddly bits.
It's all mixed up.
The first step is figuring out what even anything is
and, in fact, the one thing I do have that's helpful
is this. The moose manual.
- (chuckles)
- You've got some stuff running.
You're doing some classes.
You wanna talk about that?
- Sure, I have been doing cat skeleton articulation classes.
This is a course where you learn
how to take a disarticulated cat skeleton
and give it new life.
And every student leaves with a full skeleton
with a base on a little stand.
And I was doing this live
but now I'm doing it virtually
and they've been going great.
I just did a couple of my first ones.
They're located on my website.
There currently sold out for the next week
but then I'll be adding some more when I catch up.
- Just to be clear,
you send people the skeleton. They are not responsible
for acquiring a cat skeleton, right?
- (chuckles) Yeah, I send a medically cleaned,
perfectly fully functional cat skeleton.
They're all humanely sourced, ethically sourced.
And it shows up at your doorstep,
And then through Zoom,
I explain the process of putting it together
and then I help you complete the piece.
- Cool, you'll be teaching me
a one-on-one moose articulation skeleton.
- Yeah then as we had to postpone Los Angeles,
our Oddities Flea Markets are still going to be happening.
They're just all kinda of postponed
for the time being, until further notice.
Our website will be announcing when we've rescheduled,
if we had to reschedule, but so far
we still have some good ones on the books.
We have Chicago, San Francisco, L.A., and New York.
- Cool.
Well, always a pleasure.
Good to talk to you.
- You too.
- All right, I will see you soon.
- Yeah, see you.
Everybody stay safe and stay indoors until we can get out.
- Good advice, good parting words.
Thank you so much for watching this show,
part of our Wonder From Home project,
and let us know who you think we should talk to next.
If you think that's you please let us know in the comments
and tell us the kind of things you want to share
and Show & Tell about.
Thanks for watching.
I'll see you next time.