Wunderkammer
A Cabinet of Curiosities, or Cabinet of Wonder, and in German Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer (wonder-room), were encyclopaedic collections of objects where categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. In Renaissance Europe, the ‘cabinet’ was a reference to an entire room rather than just a cupboard – and they were often famous collections of rulers and aristocrats wishing to create a microcosm of their own world or a theatre of memory. Nowadays, we would pigeonhole the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities.
Wunderkammen have cropped up often in contemporary art exhibition planning. The old and dusty collection of kitsch yet carefully selected ephemera have provided the impetus for many artists and curators, writers and philosophers to sum up their reasons to present a collection of artefacts otherwise disparate and obtuse. Historically speaking, (well, historically in terms of contemporary art,) this is evident in the vitrines and museum settings of the ‘Block Beuys’ in Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany, where the iconic artist Joseph Beuys has set his objects and personal items in a pseudo museuological display. When visiting, one is not sure if one is looking at artefact or artwork. It almost feels hermetically sealed like a time capsule with the artists inimitable fat and felt, such is the smell and atmosphere of this claustrophobic 1970’s display.
Most recently, and perhaps with more conscious reference to Seventeenth Century inspirations, this has been seen locally in the Study at Nottingham Contemporary, where artists and writers such as Pablo Bronstein, Wayne Koestenbaum, Matthew Brannon and Anthea Hamilton have in turn presented their curios (relating thematically to exhibitions, of course) in intricate antique cabinets. The website proclaims that the cabinets’ method of display are the ‘root of modern museums’.
This is a point contradicted by Douglas Crimp, who, in his book ‘On The Museum’s Ruins’ 1993, sums up the satisfaction in the random encounter of an object, rather than the ordered chronology of a museum or gallery we might understand today:
"Anyone who has ever read a description of a Wunderkammer, or a cabinet des curiosities, would recognise the folly of locating the origin of the museum there, the utter incompatibility of the Wunderkammer's selection of objects, its system of classification, with our own. This late Renaissance type of collection did not evolve into the modern museum. Rather it was dispersed; its sole relation to present-day collections is that certain of its 'rarities' eventually found their way into our museums (or museum departments) of natural history, of ethnography, of decorative arts, of arms and armour, of history...even in some cases our museums of art."
It is perhaps that elusive collection of rarities, which other contemporary proponents of the Wunderkammer wish to draw attention to today.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) is a unique and inscrutable Los Angeles institution ‘dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic’. The objects within the MJT’s delicate displays range from the fantastic to the arcane. The permanent collection is home to human horns, Cameroonian stink ants, ancient fruit stone carvings and Noah’s Ark, as well as objects whose true origins remain untraceable. The MJT draws its inspiration from cabinets of curiosities, in which natural wonders were freely combined with equally awe-inspiring works of man. In the spirit of these Wunderkammen, the museum’s curator, David Wilson, has accumulated the precious archives of artists, scientists and theorists whose work has been previously lost, ignored, marginalised or dismissed as eccentric.
It has been my experience to find out about the old from the new. Goshka Macuga’s recreation of the Picture Room at Gasworks in 2003, led me to its source of inspiration - that of Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the famous Bank of England Architect chose to display his collection of Hogarth paintings in a picture cabinet/door system a kin more to a poster rack at Virgin Megastore; each opening cabinet door adorned with a piece from the Rake’s or a Harlot’s Progress series, like the pages of a book. Within the facsimile, Macuga curated an exhibition of artworks from thirty collaborating artists. In an effort to contextualise and understand of viewing a work of a more contemporary artist’s plan, I was able to relish the crammed setting of shelves and vitrines more akin to a sideshow truck full of freakish junk in the original version set out in 1800’s. The entire Soane museum viewed as a totality can be appreciated as much for the formal qualities of the arrangements of antiques and art works as for the mood and tone that the space has as an environment, for there is no surface which is not adorned with ephemeral delight and objects for study and contemplation. Where there is a gap in the walls, Soane placed mirrors to reflect yet another dimension or facet of his Wunderkammer.
The Wunderkammer for Sideshow 2010
No Sideshow would be complete without a cabinet of curiosities, or a "Museum Show". In the traditional Coney-island sense of the term, such a spectacle might be set aside in its own trailer and described as "World's Greatest Freaks Past and Present," a ‘sideshow’ in which the exhibits are usually not alive. It might include tanks of piranhas or cages with unusual animals, stuffed freak animals or other exotic items like the weapons or cars allegedly used by famous murderers. Some of the exhibits might even be dummies or photographs of the billed attractions.
The Wunderkammer will be a core part of Sideshow in 2010. More survey than freakshow, more ‘elusive collection of rarities’ than taxidermied corpses, this unique open exhibition taking place at The Hopkinson Gallery at the Art Organisation and will reveal a display which harks back to a pre-museum state. The ‘utter incompatibility’ of works will attempt to show things without thematic categorisation and reveal individual treasures carefully put together by individual artists. The gallery space itself started life as a vast hardware store in which drawers and cabinets were filled with every screw or nail known to man, and the window was crammed tightly with new contraptions and tools. For Sideshow the walls and floors again will be filled with curios and artefacts, reverting to a previous state where every surface presented something to wonder over.
Sideshow is inviting artists living and working in Nottingham, to bring an object of curiosity for display, whether that is an artwork made by them or some artefact, which gives them inspiration. It will be registered and catalogued in to this temporary cabinet of curiosity and returned to them when the exhibition is over. To find out more how to enter your work to the Wunderkammer, visit www.sideshow2010.org.
The Wunderkammer will be on display from Friday 22nd October to Sunday 14th November and part of Sideshow’s core programme which is expected to attract around 50,000 people over the course of 8 weeks.
Further Reading:
The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury Of The Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga, Bloomsbury Press, 1998
The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, MIT Press, 1993
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, Lawrence Weschler, 1996
Recommended UK Wunderkammer-type places to visit:
Snowshill Manor, home of Charles Paget Wade in Gloucestershire
The John Soane Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford
The Tradescant Collections, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
