The cabinet of curiosity
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a cabinet of curiosities – also called cabinet of wonder or wunderkammer – was a place, or more precisely a wooden piece of furniture with several compartments, where people used to exhibit precious or/and extraordinary and bizarre objects, artefacts and specimens (curiosities). Such a form of display developed during the Renaissance among kings, princes, popes, wealthy merchants or rulers, who used them as vectors of power and influence, but also among apothecaries, as resources of research material, and scholars for pedagogical purpose (teaching material). In the two last examples, these installations were motivated by a kind of encyclopedic[p1] ambition: to create miniature versions of the universe, “to depict microcosms of the world”. Capturing the world and then displaying it, storing it in nothing bigger than a single room or a piece of furniture, implied making a selection and inevitably reducing reality, the surrounding existent things, to the essential (rather than being exhaustive). Here, the essential meant objects that the collectors of the Renaissance considered as possessing the faculty to give them access to all the available knowledge of their time. But why curiosities?
By this time, people believed that nature unveiled all its beauty, richness and fascinating complexity through its irregularities, anomalies, freaks and monsters, specimens and objects arousing astonishment, and by thus challenging any attempts of classification, blurring the frontiers between the spheres of art, nature and science. Because of their multifaceted, crossing-boundaries character, the so-called curiosities worked supposedly as bridges between the different realms of a universal network (this world “bound with secret knots”[1]) that it was possible to understand only through an interconnected intellectual approach. The essence of things was achieved by some kind of synthesis. However, the connections could be made only at the condition that the curiosities were displayed in a sufficiently evocative way: “Against the background of the supposed microcosm-macrocosm-correspondence, [it was] the juxtaposition of objects in a room or cabinet [that] generated meaningful associations, the objects functioning as vessels in which diverse connotations converged.”[2]
Thus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, transversal logic was apparently a key principle. This is a relationship with knowledge totally different from the post-Enlightenment or positivist rationalist attempt to organize human knowledge in separate – and often hermetic – categories and disciplines, which determined the emergence of specialists and the current section-split organization of today’s natural history and university museums. For instance, a “Natural World” section, displays the collection of animals, plants, rocks/minerals and meteorites, whereas a “World Cultures” section is dedicated to the archaeological, anthropological and ethnographic collections.
By recuperating the cabinet of curiosity legacy, Mark Dion’s work questions the relevance of our current classificatory schemes and investigates how – applied to the way objects are presented in museums – they shape our perception and understanding of the world. In both projects, “Cabinet of curiosity” made for the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University (1997) and “Cabinets of curiosities” elaborated with the Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota (2001), he challenges the institution’s choices of classification and display by installing his own little alternative museums (the cabinets) within a museum. His critical approach concerns the natural history and university museums rather than art or history ones, because they appear to be the successors of the former cabinets of wonder, for using quite a similar way to exhibit the same kind of objects, and for being “the very sites of knowledge production and meaning making”.[3] What is Mark Dion’s idea of what a museum should be?
How do the cabinets of curiosities challenge the visitors’ mind?
Mark Dion arranges the objects into nine compartments or collections: The Underworld, The Sea, The Air, The Earth, Humans, Knowledge, Time, Vision and History.
The fact that each oh these nine collections is composed of objects coming from different collections of the museum highlights the arbitrary and subjective character of the choices made by the curators, when preparing their exhibitions. Dion’s cabinets demonstrate that other coherent combination of objects, other organization of knowledge that the one imposed to the visitors is always possible.
Furthermore, by confronting pre-Enlightenment ideas with positivist thought, sixteenth century wunderkammer with today’s museum, the artist reminds us that knowledge, as it is designed by institutions, can never be taken for granted, since the selection of what constitutes knowledge as well as the ideologies, methodologies and practices determining this selection constantly change throughout history.
The multiple origins of the items gathered in each of the nine collections also points out the barriers existing between the different departments of a same museum, the absence of a dialogue, a sharing of information and experiences which would have permitted to develop a trans-disciplinary method of knowledge dissemination.
By enclosing things into categories, providing the visitors with “predigested information” (captions, explicative wall panels and information sheets, audio-guides, etc.), the museums distract the viewers’ attention away from the objects and save no room for suspense, ambiguity, questioning, inquiring, imagination, openness, and doubt. They prevent the visitors from learning by actively interrogating the way objects are displayed instead of passively receiving formatted answers. The cabinets of curiosities however, force the viewer to search for meaning:
“The formal composition of each cabinet has a mixture of artistic works and man made creations, [creates] wonder by seeing the similarities between them”, “a barrier [prevents] the audience from coming with five feet of the display, creating tension by making it difficult to discern the contents”[4], so that “our sense of wonder and excitement is tinged with burning curiosity as to what the compartments, drawers, and doors might be hiding”[5].
So, in summary, the ideal museum, according to Mark Dion, should appeal principally to the visitors’ sense of view and of wonder, by elaborating intriguing and suggestive forms of display, rather than systematically directing/putting their steps towards a unique path. He describes it as “a kind of visually and intellectually exciting space, a space that is really going to take me other places, a space that’s going to be a key to a whole body of ideas”[6]. This does not imply that the employees’ specialist expertise should be rejected. It should remain a “prime knowledgebase” on which museums should keep on relying, as well as they should also rely on the objects’ ability to speak for themselves about reality, not only through their “concreteness”, testimony value or “historicity”, but also through their ability to convey emotions, thoughts and stories, whatever/no matter (how) conform to the institutionalized knowledge or not they are.
=> Now is then. Snapshots from the Maresca collection
Useful links and bibliography:
– http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/endt.pdf
– Sheehy, Colleen, Bill Horrigan and E Bruce Robertson. Cabinet of curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
– Neville, Daniel. “Classifying Mark Dion”, in Nevolution: an illustrated journal of nevolution and the theories of intelligent design: http://nevolution.typepad.com/theories/2010/06/mark-dion.html
[1] « The world was bound with secret knots” according to the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in his 1667 study on magnetism, Magneticum Naturae Regnum. Quoted in Endt, Marion, Beyond institutional critique: Mark Dion’s surrealist wunderkammer at the Manchester Museum, in Museum and society, March 2007, 5(1) 1-15
[2] Endt
[3] Id.
[4] Neville, Daniel. “Classifying Mark Dion”, in Nevolution: an illustrated journal of nevolution and the theories of intelligent design: http://nevolution.typepad.com/theories/2010/06/mark-dion.html
[5] Endt
[6] Quoted in Endt
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